1. Introduction
Marketing has always been about shaping how people see and choose things. In the early days, it was simple: shout loud enough from a market stall, and buyers might come. But as the world changed, so did the ways we reach people. Think of the printing press spreading pamphlets far and wide, or radio waves carrying voices into homes. Each new tool stretched marketing’s arm longer, making it possible to touch more lives without being in the same room. These shifts turned isolated pitches into widespread conversations, laying the groundwork for how we influence decisions today.
Fast forward to the present, and technology has turned that arm into a web of connections. Smartphones ping notifications, algorithms guess what you want before you do, and social feeds buzz with shares that ripple out like waves in a pond. This shift isn’t just about speed or scale; it’s about how ideas spread in loops, not straight lines. Old models of marketing, built for a slower time, have bent and grown to fit this new reality. They track how tech lets us whisper to millions or spark chains of word-of-mouth that grow on their own, revealing patterns that earlier thinkers could only glimpse.
At the heart of this essay is a hypothesis: the big ideas in marketing—like AIDA from the 1800s, Kotler’s funnels from the mid-20th century, Byron Sharp’s growth laws from 2010, and Binet and Field’s balance rule from 2013—form a kind of evolutionary path. This ‘arc’ mirrors tech’s jumps, from print to broadcast, then internet, and now AI-driven networks. As digital reach expands, these models start to blend, especially in a world of network effects where one share can snowball into thousands, and power laws where a few hits drive most results. It’s like watching a tree grow branches as the soil gets richer with each rain of innovation.
AIDA kicked it off with a straight path: grab attention, build interest, stir desire, spur action. Kotler added layers, making it about customers talking back, with his 5 A’s looping in advocacy. Sharp flipped the focus to being easy to recall and buy, using data from the web era. Binet and Field stressed mixing quick wins with lasting builds, fitting the measurable digital age. Together, they show a progression from rigid steps to flexible flows.
The essay will trace this arc step by step, showing how each model builds on the last as tech evolves. We’ll see the early linear funnels, mid-century tweaks, data-driven turns, and today’s mash-up amid viral dynamics. Finally, we’ll weigh the idea’s strengths and peek at what’s next.
This path shows marketing isn’t static; it’s a living thing, shaped by the tools we make and the connections they forge.
2. Historical Foundations: The Origins of the Marketing Funnel
Every big idea starts small, often tied to the tools of its time. The marketing funnel, that core path from first glance to final buy, began in an era when spreading a message meant ink on paper or shouts in a crowded square. Picture a bustling 19th-century street: hawkers wave flyers, shop signs catch the eye. This world birthed AIDA, a simple sequence to guide how ads pull people in. Coined by E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. It maps a straight line through the buyer’s mind.
Attention comes first—grab the gaze with a bold headline or vivid image, like a poster screaming “New Invention!” amid grey streets. Without it, the rest collapses. Interest builds next, feeding details to hold focus, perhaps describing how the product eases daily chores. Desire stirs emotion, painting a picture of life improved—happier, easier, admired. Action seals it, with a clear call like “Buy Now!” or directions to the store. This model treated people as predictable responders, much like early machines churning out uniform parts. It worked because ads were scarce; one strong pitch could stand out.
Yet AIDA’s power lay in its unflinching view of human limits. Decisions aren’t endless debates; they’re quick snaps based on what sticks first. It dismantled the illusion that buyers weigh every option rationally—most follow the path laid out, nudged by bold cues. In practice, think of old cigarette ads: a dashing figure grabs attention, stories of glamour build interest, envy sparks desire, and a coupon prompts action. Simple, effective, but rigid.
This birth tied directly to print tech’s rise. The steam-powered press flooded markets with cheap papers and posters, expanding reach beyond word-of-mouth. Suddenly, a single ad could hit thousands, not dozens. Railways sped distribution, linking cities like veins in a body. But limitations glared. No way to track who saw what or measure drops from attention to action. Feedback was guesswork—sales up or down, no why. Interactivity? Absent. Ads pushed out, but buyers couldn’t push back easily.
These constraints shaped AIDA’s linearity, like a one-way road with no turns. It assumed passive audiences, ignoring how people chat and share. As tech hinted at more—telegraphs zipping messages, photos adding realism—the model hinted at evolution. What if reach grew interactive? Speculate ahead: broadcast waves would bend this line, adding loops. For now, AIDA stood as the arc’s firm base, a pattern matcher for human habits, tuned by trial to what sells. Its core truth endures: grab the mind fast, or lose it forever. This foundation set the stage for tweaks as airwaves and screens reshaped the game.
3. Mid-Century Refinements: Customer-Centric Shifts in the Broadcast Age
As airwaves crackled to life and screens flickered in living rooms, marketing stepped beyond print’s flat pages. The mid-20th century brought broadcast tools that flooded homes with voices and images, turning one-way shouts into shared experiences. This era refined the funnel, making it less about pushing products and more about pulling in people as active players. Philip Kotler, a key thinker, took AIDA’s straight line and curved it into a journey centred on the customer.
Kotler’s traditional funnel, emerging in the 1960s, formalised how buyers move from awareness to loyalty. It starts broad at the top with exposure, narrows through evaluation and purchase, then widens again for repeat buys and advocacy. Unlike AIDA’s quick pull, this added segmentation—grouping people by needs or habits—and positioning, crafting a brand to fit those slots. Imagine a car ad on TV: it doesn’t just grab eyes; it speaks to families craving safety or young drivers chasing speed. Broadcast tech enabled this. Radio and TV reached millions at once, like a town crier with a megaphone spanning continents. Sales data from stores fed back rough insights, dismantling the myth of uniform crowds. People aren’t blank slates; they filter messages through their lives. Kotler’s model exposed this truth: ignore the customer’s world, and your pitch fizzles. Everyday evidence? Coca-Cola’s ads shifted from generic refreshment to lifestyle fits, boosting sales by matching moods.
Yet this funnel still leaned linear, assuming steady progress. As tech hinted at more—computers crunching data, phones linking voices—Kotler adapted. His 5 A’s framework, refined in later works like Marketing 4.0 around 2016, but rooted in mid-century ideas, made the path looped and responsive. Aware: spot the brand amid noise. Appeal: stand out with relevance. Ask: prompt searches or questions. Act: drive the buy. Advocate: turn buyers into sharers. This isn’t a straight road; it’s a cycle where one step feeds back. Early digital tools amplified it. Search engines let people ‘ask’ actively, like typing “best coffee” into a budding web. Social chats sparked advocacy, where a friend’s praise loops back to awareness for others.
Picture a holiday booking: TV sparks awareness, appeal builds via targeted mail, you ask friends or browse early sites, act with a call, then advocate by telling stories. Kotler’s shift unflinchingly reveals decisions as messy webs, not tidy lines—emotions and peers pull harder than facts alone. It wove in how tech turns passive viewers into seekers, foreshadowing networks where shares explode.
These refinements paralleled tech’s leaps. Broadcast saturated reach, early computers tracked patterns, dismantling illusions of isolated choices. Decisions emerge from contexts, like patterns in a crowd’s flow. Speculate: as internet wires connected dots, this customer focus would demand data to prove what works. Kotler’s arc bent the funnel flexible, ready for empirical tests in a wired world.
4. Data-Driven Evolution: Empirical Insights in the Internet Era
Wires connected the world, and data poured through like rivers after rain. The internet era, kicking off in earnest around the 2000s, shifted marketing from gut feels to hard numbers. Broadband spread fast, social sites linked friends, and clicks left trails. This flood demanded models that sifted facts from fluff, exposing what truly drives buys. Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, from 2010, cut through old myths with evidence from vast datasets.
Sharp’s core: brands grow by reaching more people, not deepening ties with few. Mental availability means popping into minds during choices—like Coke surfacing when thirsty. Physical availability puts it on shelves or screens, easy to grab. Penetration trumps loyalty; light buyers, not die-hards, fuel expansion. Distinctiveness over differentiation—memorable quirks like Apple’s clean lines stand out in crowds. This dismantled the illusion of loyal tribes: most shoppers drift, picking what’s familiar and handy. Everyday proof? Supermarket aisles: you grab known brands without deep thought, habits tuned by repeated glimpses.
Tied to tech, Sharp’s ideas fit a fragmented web. Broadband let ads scatter across sites, but attention splintered. Social media amplified shares, making broad reach vital amid noise. Data tools tracked views and buys, revealing patterns: a few assets drive recall, like logos in feeds. It’s like stateless systems matching tokens—no persistent bond, just weights from past exposures sparking recognition. Speculate: as algorithms personalised feeds, this pushed brands to stay salient everywhere, not niche corners. Sharp’s empirical arc bent funnels wide, prioritising scale over stories.
Les Binet and Peter Field built on this with The Long and the Short of It in 2013, analysing campaigns for balance. Their 60/40 rule: spend 60 percent on long-term brand building, 40 on short-term activation. Long-term uses emotion—fame, feelings—to etch memories, like Nike’s inspiring ads boosting premium prices over years. Short-term hits rational triggers—deals, calls-to-action—for quick sales spikes. But these fade fast without the base. They warned against short-termism in digital metrics: easy to chase clicks, hard to see lasting lift.
This unflinchingly shows metrics’ trap—numbers lure focus to immediate wins, ignoring slow builds. Real-world example: a flash sale boosts carts today, but without emotional pull, tomorrow’s empty. Big data and programmatic ads enabled this split: algorithms bid on spots in real-time, tracking every interaction. Yet the core truth: emotions outsell facts for big growth, as data proved. Like pattern matchers without agency, campaigns emerge effective from tuned inputs—human habits, not magic.
Their work mirrored 2010s tech: analytics dashboards quantified everything, from views to conversions. This made funnels measurable, but probabilistic—outcomes skew, a few hits yielding most value.
These models advance the arc by weaving data into the fabric, turning guesses into proofs. Sharp scaled reach in digital sprawl; Binet and Field balanced horizons amid metrics’ glare. Together, they align with expanding web ties, setting up loops where one click sparks chains. As networks grew, this data lens would meet explosive dynamics, blending paths into webs.
5. Contemporary Convergence: Alignment Amid Network Effects and Power Law Dynamics
Screens multiply, connections pulse, and ideas leap like sparks in dry grass. Today’s digital world fuses the arc’s threads into one fabric, where network effects turn single touches into cascades. These effects follow rules like Metcalfe’s: value squares with users. In funnels, this means one share ripples wide. Kotler’s advocacy loops back to awareness via social chains—a friend’s like pulls in strangers. Sharp’s mental availability surges as posts go viral, embedding brands in minds without direct ads. Binet and Field’s long-term builds gain staying power; emotional stories shared online etch deeper than solo views. Real-life: a TikTok challenge for a sneaker brand starts small, snowballs to millions, blending appeal and action in hours. This dismantles the myth of controlled paths—decisions emerge from webs, not lines, tuned by collective weights like stateless matchers spotting patterns in crowds.
Power laws skew it all, where few elements grab most gains. Outcomes follow 80/20 splits: a handful of posts drive traffic, echoing fat tails in data. AIDA’s steps compress; one viral hit shortcuts from attention to advocacy. Sharp’s broad reach exploits this—target everywhere, as hits cluster unpredictably. Binet and Field’s balance shines: short activations spark, but long emotions sustain the skew. Everyday evidence: influencer drops sell out fast, yet brand fame keeps demand steady. The core truth: equality in exposure is illusion; dynamics favour the amplified. Speculate: AI curates feeds, tilting laws further, making funnels probabilistic bets on breakout moments.
In 2020s tech, these align holistically. AI and metaverses dissolve barriers, weaving Kotler’s loops with Sharp’s scale and Binet’s mix. Funnels become adaptive maps, where networks feed power laws into endless cycles. This convergence crowns the arc, ready for critiques and tomorrows.
6. Critical Evaluation: Strengths, Limitations, and Future Implications
This arc stands on solid ground, its strengths clear in how it maps marketing’s growth alongside tech’s strides. Models evolve adaptively: AIDA’s rigid line suited print’s limits, bending into Kotler’s customer loops as broadcasts invited feedback. Sharp’s data-driven scale tackled web fragmentation, while Binet and Field’s 60/40 balance countered metrics’ short-sight. Everyday cases back this—think how Instagram Reels fuse Sharp’s broad recall with Kotler’s advocacy, viral hits proving network effects align stages. The hypothesis unflinchingly strips away the notion of timeless models; they are tech-tuned patterns, emerging from human habits and tools, no fixed agency. This view guides marketers to hybrid strategies, blending old linearity with new loops for resilient growth.
Limitations cut in, though. The arc ties too neatly to tech, overlooking other forces like behavioural economics—Kahneman’s fast-slow thinking shaped decisions long before digital. In non-digital realms, like local shops or B2B deals, alignments weaken; power laws skew less without networks. Tensions persist: Sharp’s penetration clashes with Binet’s emotional long-term, revealing incomplete fusion. The core truth: no universal path exists; contexts fracture the arc.
Future paths stretch it further. AI could weave predictive layers, metaverses turning funnels into immersive realms where choices unfold in virtual crowds. This evolution demands vigilance—tech’s pace may outstrip models, urging constant tweaks.
7. Conclusion
This evolutionary arc charts a clear path for marketing models, from AIDA’s unyielding linear sequence in the print-dominated world to Kotler’s customer-focused loops that captured the interactive essence of broadcast media. As the internet era dawned, Sharp’s emphasis on broad availability and penetration dismantled narrow loyalty myths, using data to prioritise scale in a fragmented landscape. Binet and Field then refined this with their 60/40 balance, urging a mix of emotional long-term building and rational short-term activations to combat the pitfalls of metric obsession. Each model has bent to technological winds—expanding reach from static pages to dynamic networks—while converging in today’s reality of power laws and network effects, where funnels morph into probabilistic webs that amplify a few key moments into widespread impact.
For marketers navigating this terrain, the implications are straightforward yet profound. Embrace hybrid approaches: layer Sharp’s empirical breadth over Kotler’s relational loops, tempering Binet and Field’s balance with an eye for viral skews. In practice, this means designing campaigns that exploit digital connections—like a social post that cascades through shares, blending awareness and advocacy in real time. The unflinching truth here strips away any illusion of control; marketing success emerges from tuned patterns in human behaviour and tech ecosystems, not from isolated genius or rigid plans. Everyday strategies must adapt, betting on flexibility to turn unpredictable dynamics into growth.
Yet this arc doesn’t end here. It hints at further bends, particularly through the behavioural science lens championed by thinkers like Rory Sutherland. His framework overlays psychological insights—drawing from Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 thinking—onto the funnel, prioritising intuitive, emotional ‘psycho-logic’ over pure rationality. Sutherland’s contribution evolves the arc by exposing how even data-driven models overlook irrational drivers: decisions snap from heuristics, not endless logic, with nudges exploiting automatic responses for outsized effects. This builds on Sharp’s availability and Binet’s emotional long-term focus, but pushes deeper into why broad reach works—because it primes subconscious biases in a network-saturated world. In an age of AI-curated experiences, his view represents the next evolution, urging marketers to blend measurable tactics with creative alchemy that defies metrics.
Looking ahead, as metaverses and predictive AI reshape interactions, the arc will likely curve toward even more human-centric, behaviourally informed systems. Marketers who grasp this progression—riding tech’s waves while anchoring in core truths about decision-making—will forge resilient paths. The story of marketing remains one of adaptation, where tools and insights intertwine to reveal the patterns that truly move people.
References
Binet, Les, and Peter Field. The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), 2013. https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/publications-reports/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-balancing-short-and-long-term-marketing-strategies This seminal IPA report provides the empirical foundation for the 60/40 rule and the balance between brand-building and activation discussed in the data-driven evolution section.
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374533557/thinkingfastandslow Influential work on System 1 and System 2 thinking, referenced in the conclusion as underpinning Rory Sutherland’s behavioural extensions to the arc.
Kotler, Philip, Hermawan Kartajaya, and Iwan Setiawan. Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital. John Wiley & Sons, 2017. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Marketing+4.0%3A+Moving+from+Traditional+to+Digital-p-9781119341208 The book that introduces the 5 A’s framework as an update to traditional funnels in the digital age, central to the mid-century refinements section.
Lewis, E. St. Elmo. Referenced in historical discussions of the AIDA model, commonly attributed through Edward K. Strong Jr.’s The Psychology of Selling and Advertising (1925). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing) Foundational linear model originating around 1898-1908, forming the starting point of the evolutionary arc in the historical foundations section.
Sharp, Byron. How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Oxford University Press, 2010. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-brands-grow-9780195573565 Core text on mental and physical availability, penetration, and distinctiveness, key to the internet-era empirical insights section.
Sutherland, Rory. Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense. WH Allen, 2019. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/430379/alchemy-by-rory-sutherland/9780753556528 Explores psycho-logic and behavioural nudges, hinted at in the conclusion as the next potential evolution of the marketing models arc.
Metcalfe, Robert. Original formulation of Metcalfe’s Law, circa 1980 (presentation slide), later discussed in George Gilder’s “Metcalfe’s Law and Legacy” (Forbes ASAP, 1993). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law Underpins the explanation of network effects amplifying modern funnels in the contemporary convergence section.