The AIDA Principle and Extended Customer Relationship Management

This principle refers to a quite simple and straightforward definition used to describe a sequence of behaviors that I value highly and have observed to be very effective in many fields. 

Even though the advertising world is becoming increasingly competitive, the principle behind advertising copy remains the same. The four steps that copywriters use to persuade consumers to purchase products are the attention factor, interest, desire, and action elements. This model is briefly called AIDA. It can be said that advertising and marketing goals are fundamentally achieved through the effective use of this model.

In marketing communication, the term AIDA was coined in the late 1800s by American advertising and sales pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis. The model describes the different stages a consumer goes through before purchasing a product or service. According to him, most marketers follow this model to attract more customers to their products. It is observed that this model is also widely used in today's advertisements.

The AIDA acronym stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This refers to the four stages a consumer goes through while watching an advertisement. According to Lewis, the first and most important task of an advertisement is to grab the customers' attention. Once an advertisement has grabbed attention, it must arouse interest in the product in the consumers' minds. After interest is created, the advertisement should create a desire in the consumer to use the product, and finally, the consumer should take action by purchasing the product.

· Attention: Attention is usually grabbed using elements such as images, color, layout, typography, size, celebrities, or models.

· Interest: Once attention is grabbed, a desire to learn more about the advertised brand should be aroused in the viewer. Interest can be sparked by using an attractive subheading.

· Desire: The desire element is usually created with the advertising copy. Here, it is explained in detail why the brand should be purchased, and the brand's features, facts, and figures are explained.

· Action: At the end of the advertisement, viewers are expected to take immediate action. For this, store addresses, toll-free phone numbers, or website address information (links) are shared.

An important point regarding AIDA is that the success of an advertisement (or propaganda) depends on the viewers' ability to notice and understand the message. This requires knowing the target audience well. It would be appropriate here to refer to Marshall McLuhan's words, "the medium is the message." In order for our target audience to fully perceive our message, we must also choose the appropriate medium or environment. For example, while it may be appropriate to publish advertisements on Instagram and X to appeal to Generation X or Y, environments like TikTok or Snapchat might be more suitable for appealing to Generation Z. 

Another important point is that the AIDA principle sits right in the middle of the relationship between institutions and customers, which we define as B2C (business to customer). The before and after must also be carefully taken into account. When we act with a classic shopping mindset, we somehow grabbed the customer's attention with an advertisement and ensured they took action, i.e., made a purchase. But has the process ended? Or rather, it is more correct to ask first: was the process started correctly?

Let me explain what I mean by being started correctly: Before moving to the AIDA stage, that is, before grabbing the buyer's (customer's) attention, we need to define the buyer. What are the characteristics of our customer? Who fits these characteristics? How many of them have shopped from us or our competitors before? With an approach that we can summarize as CRM 2.0 (Customer Relationship Management 2.0), we need to determine what characteristics the customers we expect to purchase our products and services should have, and determine in which environments we can reach and address them. In other words, we need to identify the "potential customer." Social media measurement tools are widely used for this, and it is possible to say that they are quite successful, but one point should not be overlooked. Needs and desires can change very rapidly in today's post-truth era. Therefore, the structures we call customers or target audiences are not fixed, stationary structures. They are quite fluid and volatile formations. 

We can observe the most prominent example of this in undecided voter behavior. Therefore, real-time and continuous social media measurement has become a necessity. In this case, instead of customer behaviors and demands that we measure at intervals from time to time, we will encounter customer behaviors and demands that are constantly moving in different directions and showing variability. We will need to analyze these continuously, in other words, instantaneously. To give a very typical example, when an election is to be held, instead of measuring voter preferences starting a few months or weeks before the election, making such measurements continuously will yield more realistic results. Thus, the data collected up to that point will provide what the next step of the voters might be, converging to reality in a statistically significant way. Some might object here by mentioning that the cost of continuous measurement will be high. But it should not be forgotten that people are spending more and more time on social media, and since this environment is a digital environment, technologies related to "business intelligence" and "marketing intelligence" tools for "making measurements" are developing very rapidly and costs are falling. Especially the use of artificial intelligence in these areas accelerates development even further. Thus, for example, it becomes possible to identify "potential customers" who have not been our customers but have similar characteristics to our customers. 

Now let's come to what happens at the end of the AIDA, i.e., the shopping process. I mentioned that the customer purchasing the product or service does not constitute the end of the process. According to the CRM 2.0 approach, we should not archive the information we obtain about the customer after the purchase and put it aside. The first question we should ask here is, "if the customer shopped from us once, how can we ensure they do it again?" That is, is repeat shopping possible? Looking at it from the voter's perspective, we can also ask, "will that person vote for us again in the next election?" The only way to do this is to follow the customer after the purchase instead of saying "we hope so." What did they do after buying? Were they satisfied? Do they have a complaint? Did they recommend it to someone else? Follow-up is essential to answer these and similar questions. Similarly, it is important that this follow-up is also measured in real-time and continuously on social media. 

In a process that we can also describe as the extended AIDA process, monitoring the customer instantaneously and continuously before, during, and after the purchase plays a vital role for today's dynamic customer relationship management. 

On the other side of the coin, there is the problem that algorithms used to constantly track customers pose a significant threat to the protection of personal data (KVKK). At the point we have reached, while there is a certain level of awareness regarding KVKK, it is worth saying that there is a long way to go. You can find my thoughts on what can be done about this in my previous articles where I talked about algorithms and social media.