The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business

“AIDA”

Use: Advertising Planning, Measurement

The Concept

This little tool (see Figure A.4) is typical of a number of ideas (called “response hierarchy models”) intended to be practical mechanisms to design, plan, and measure advertising and to plan sales calls. Although the concepts that they are based on vary, they assume that the buyer “passes through a cognitive, affective and behavioural stage”; to quote Professor Kotler (Kotler, P., 2003). In other words, they assume that buyers move through a number of states of mind in relation to buying any item. AIDA is one of the most widely known and taught. It assumes that people become interested in a product or service after the proposition has first gained their attention. Properly crafted, communication will then cause them to desire it. This, in turn, will prompt them to buy.

Figure A.4: The AIDA concept

Advocates of this approach suggest that this tool can be used to plan the different methods of reaching customers in different states (using, for instance, advertising to gain attention and sales people to stimulate the action of purchase). They argue that this enables marketers to optimize marketing budgets and measure their effect. Suppliers should segment their intended market into groups of buyers who are at different stages ...