AIDAS Model: Attention-Interest-Desire-Action-Satisfaction, in Sales & Marketing

How many times have you paid close attention to why you act on a certain message or advert while you don’t on others? Actually, most of us don’t always act consciously or actively think about why some messages grab our attention and make us take action while most of them fail to do so. AIDA or AIDAS is one of the marketing and advertising model and tool that is used to accomplish exactly that.

The AIDAS theory in marketing and sales is one of the widely used theories and is the basis for core training material across individuals and organizations.

This simple theory goes a long way in terms of allowing you to provide an organized way to engage your prospect or customer.

It has a wide application not only in marketing and sales but across fields where you have to engage your audience or prospect. Even if in personal life if you have an occasion to engage your friends with the message that you wish to convey, AIDAS can be a very useful tool. We will go through the AIDAS theory and its application with examples in detail.

AIDAS Definition

After its development in the late 19th century, the model remains one of the longest surviving models used in marketing and advertising.

For more than 100 years, the model has undergone many refinements and extensions, such that today there are many variants in circulation. AIDAS is a simple and popular extension of the original AIDA class of models, collectively known as hierarchical models or hierarchy of effects models.

AIDAS stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction. The AIDAS theory is based on the principle that a prospect goes through five different stages before finally responding satisfactorily to our product.

This enables marketers and sellers to lead a customer through all five stages effectively and maximize the overall objective of their marketing or advertising campaign.

Variation of AIDAS

Don’t get confused by various variations of AIDAS as they are based on the same principle that a prospect goes through different stages before acting on your message. Three of the most popular variations of AIDAS are mentioned below.

1. AIDA – Doesn’t have S-Satisfaction as one of the stages
2. AIDCA – Additional C stands for Conviction
3. AIDEA – Additional E stands for Evidence

While similar to AIDAS there are additional stages like Conviction and Evidence, but the underlying principle remains the same.

How to Use the AIDAS Tool

Understanding what AIDAS stands for is important, however, what is even more important is to apply the principle through your marketing or sales pitch.

The simple way to best apply the AIDAS principle is to understand each of the five stages that a prospect goes through, and deal with them in the best possible way to get the desired results.

Let us first have a look at each of the stages in AIDAS and the application of the model to maximize results.

1.Attention

This is the stage where the prospect or consumer becomes aware of a category, product or brand. In layman terms, this is the first impression of your marketing or sales effort in the eyes of the end-users and customers.

Application – How to capture the attention of the customer

This is a very important stage as this is where you are going to secure the attention of the customer. There are multiple ways to best capture the attention of your prospect. For e.g in written communication, you grab the attention of your prospective customer by a catchy headline.

You can read our post on creative writing where you can explore the best ways to write a catchy headline.

In a face to face or verbal communication, one of the best ways to grab the attention of the prospect is by using the Elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a short sales pitch that grabs the attention of your prospective customers instantly. You can read more about using the Elevator Pitch.

2. Interest

Most sales professionals and marketers know that this is one of the most important stages in the selling cycle. All your sales effort will nothing if you can’t create the desired interest in the minds of the customers.

Application- How to create interest for your customers

It is very important that after grabbing the attention of your customer you create the desired interest to facilitate knowledge sharing about your product and brand. It is also important and how it’s going to help solve their problem.

This can be achieved through various techniques. One of the foremost technique is focussing on WIIFM. Don’t get perplexed by the term, it simply means ‘What’s in it for me’.

In this technique, your communication must be primarily focused on what is there in it for the customer. How your brand and product is relevant to the customer. Any marketing or sales communication should reinforce this.

Personalization is also very important at this stage. The more personalized your communication is, the more you will be able to maintain the interest of the customer.

Last but not the least, your communication must pave the way to create a desire in the customer by invoking emotions.

3. Desire

In this stage, the prospect or consumer develops a favorable opinion towards the category, product or brand. Majority of the time a buying decision is made on the basis of emotional appeal and utility.

The utility is mostly addressed through WIIFM in the earlier stage of creating interest for the customer. However, the most tricky aspect of the AIDAS communication model is creating emotional appeal which would lead to a desire to make a buying decision.

Application- How to create the desire for your customers

A desire can be created by providing an emotional appeal to your sales or marketing communication.

An essential element is also to let the prospect be aware of what they are going to lose if they don’t take action based on your communication. Some of the technique used is:

Social Proof: Others are doing it so should you

Commitment: Let your customer commit something in an earlier stage

Using authority: Establish trust by using an authority figure, institution, data.

It’s highly recommended that you read the Influencing and persuasion technique to understand the ways to create a desire in the customer.

4. Action

The final stage where the prospect or consumer forms a purchase intention, shops around, engages in trial or makes a purchase. The customer is yet not sold and complacency in this stage leads to many lost sales.

The thing to keep in mind is to ensure that you make it simpler for the customer to take action. A complex system of buying or taking action can lead to lost sales. The customer must also be able to understand clearly the value they are getting out of the action or purchase that he or she is making.

Application- How to facilitate the action from your customers

5. Satisfaction

This additional stage which has evolved over a period of time and has expanded AIDA to AIDAS addresses the retention of the customer after the purchase decision through the selling process, after-sales service, quality of service, etc.

It is often the most ignored yet important stage. The overall success of any marking or sales campaign is dependent on how well the customer is served and satisfied over a period of time.

Because no matter how powerful you design your AIDAS communication next time, the customer will only remember the last purchase experience.