Much AIDA about nothing

(With apologies to Shakespeare)

However minimal your sales or marketing training, the chances are that somewhere along the line you’ve heard about AIDA. Probably one of the most widely-taught acronyms in marketing history, you can hear anyone from esteemed university professors right down to the local sales trainer extol its virtues as the ultimate description of how to influence human behaviour when selling goods or services.

AIDA, in case you’ve forgotten (or just don’t get out enough), refers to a linear mental model that defines four stages the consumer passes through on their way to making a purchase. In other words, it’s a way of explaining how customers decide what to buy, and how the salesperson can use marketing and sales techniques at each stage of the process to raise the odds of a sale. Here’s how it goes. The first step, Attention, is the initial phase by which the potential customer is attracted to what’s on offer. Now attentive to the product or service, the person’s thinking moves to the next phase: Interest. At this point, features and benefits become important and if they’re interesting enough, then the potential buyer may Desire the product. If the price is right, then Action will follow and voila! – you’ve made the sale.

AIDA sounds an impressive model. And given its worldwide kudos, you’d expect there to be volumes of empirical research and studies to back it up. You’d be wrong. Like many other myths and fantasies that get taught as truth in the marketing arena, this one has nothing going for it in terms of evidence. In fact, AIDA was simply an idea purported by a guy named E St Elmo Lewis in – get this – 1898! Elmo wasn’t a psychologist –he was actually Advertising Manager at the National Cash Register Company and the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, but he was deeply interested in the study of psychology and how it applied to successful advertising methods. He developed his own course, ‘How Advertising Works’ and within its contents he posited his theory which he originally limited to AID – he added Action later.

Elmo’s theory, like most other theories, got good press at the time, and was modified by other marketers, researchers and psychologists that followed. AIDA often became AIDCA because Conviction was also thought to play a part in purchasing activity. Two academics, Lavidge and Steiner, expanded the original AIDA model to produce what is known as the ‘hierarchy of effects’. Much like Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of a bell being rung because a bell had previously been struck at feeding times, the ‘hierarchy of effects’ was built upon the premise that sales are simply a matter of stimulus and response.

I don’t get it. Here we are at the end of 2008 and facing a pretty heavy economical downturn, and we’re still referring to a theoretical model of how the brain works from a time when we had no MRI scans, brain pattern monitoring or the understanding of how customers think that we have today. No offence to Lewis and his followers: he did his best with the information he had at the time, but in 1898 there was no television, Internet, MySpace and YouTube. Bill Gates wasn’t even a sparkle in Mr Gates’ senior’s eye.

Consumers don’t think in a linear, logical four-step process. Brain research shows that customers use both reason and emotion to make purchasing decisions – and emotions always take first place. But where does emotion fit in the AIDA model? What about experiential elements of the sale? What about…the brand?

You see, that’s where I think the power of branding (if you understand branding correctly) defines the elements of a successful sale much more accurately than AIDA ever did – or will. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against anagrams. My own approach for successful branding which I call EPIC™ – which stands for Emotion, Perception, Innovation and Communication –is just another of the myriad of other mnemonics and plays on words that flow through our marketing profession.

But there’s a big difference. As I show in my book Branding Your Business, EPIC™ is based on up-to-date research and validated evidence, not anecdotes and wishful thinking. AIDA does nothing for me. It won’t do anything for your marketing either.

Branding Your Business has now been published in Latvia in their native language. It's titled Tava Biznesa Zimols. Would you believe my name in Latvian is Dzeimss Hammonds? Wow! Sounds strange!

Star 107 FM in Cambridge interviewed me recently for a podcast on branding. You can hear it by clicking here or right-click to download for later listening.

Claire Macdonald did a great illustration for my Christmas card this year. Check out her sight at www.clairemacdonald.co.uk
(If you weren't a lucky recipient of a card, you can view it here.)

Finally, I'd like to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Peaceful and Prosperous New Year. Remember, a strong brand is the key to success in 2009 and beyond.

Brand Halo · PO Box 1107 Burwell · Cambridge CB25 0XZ
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