Chapters
- Google broke marketing
- The funnel as it is drawn
- The customer is in motion
- Marketing is all around the customer
- Being there is not being noticed
- The Helix
- Trust, relevance, and timing
- Keep the funnel to measure
What the funnel describes, and what it does not
The funnel is a useful summary of the company's process. It shows how leads are handled, which stage a deal sits in, and what the organization does next, and it is useful for measurement. The Marketing Helix does not replace it.
But the funnel doesn't show what is happening. Drawn upright, it suggests customers are dropped in at the top, move forward in sequence, and finish at the purchase. What customers do is more complex. They can arrive from a recommendation, a review, a search, or an AI answer before any brand message reaches them. They can stall, reconsider, drift, and return. And they keep moving after they buy.
A funnel stage also does not show how much a customer trusts the company. The Marketing Helix gives trust a place in the explanation: a message from a source the customer does not find credible tends to pass without being considered. Most potential customers fall out of a funnel and are lost, and the stage count alone does not show whether trust, relevance, or timing was part of the reason.
Following the customer instead of dropping them in
The founding observation of the Marketing Helix is that customers are already in motion. Their readiness, their trust, and how seriously they are weighing a brand against its alternatives all change continuously, and most of that change is caused by things the brand did not do: a colleague's advice, a competitor's offer, a budget decision, a bad experience with someone else.
If the customer is moving, a brand cannot place them anywhere. It can only follow. In practice, following means being credibly present across the range of conditions a customer is likely to pass through, rather than tuning one campaign to one predicted moment. Because readiness is internal and largely invisible from outside, the goal is not to hit every customer at exactly the right second. It is to be there, trusted and relevant, whenever the right second arrives.
This is what the film means by target, surround, and follow. Targeting chooses who the brand is for. Surrounding means covering the range of questions and situations those people move through. Following means continuing to show up as their situation changes, instead of treating a pause as a loss.
Being there is not being noticed
Marketing is there, around the customer, and being there gives a message its chance. Before trust, relevance, or timing can matter, the message has to be noticed. A customer in motion decides what gets attention, and most marketing messages, whether paid, earned, or organic, pass without it. Exposure is not attention, and attention is not a sale.
This is the sixth of the sixteen principles of the Marketing Helix: being there is not being noticed. The film on this page was published before attention was named as a principle of its own, so it does not treat attention as a separate point. The model does, and the remake of this film gives attention its own point. Once a message is noticed, trust is the first test.
What a noticed message has to pass
In the Marketing Helix, three forces shape whether a noticed message is pulled into active consideration or passed over: trust, relevance, and timing. Trust is the permission condition: whether the customer allows the source into consideration at all. Relevance is the state-match condition: whether the message fits the question the customer is actually asking now. Timing is the convergence condition: whether trust and relevance meet while the customer is ready to act.
The forces are not additive. A message that is highly trusted and highly relevant but arrives outside the customer's readiness window does not produce half a result. It produces none. All three have to hold at the same moment, which is why the model calls the result alignment rather than a score.
When alignment happens, the customer draws the message closer. The model names that pull signal gravity. The term is explanatory, not a claim about physics. It describes the shift in who does the moving: the customer pulls the aligned message in, rather than the brand pushing every message out and hoping volume will carry it. The full treatment of each force lives on the Three Forces pages.
Why most messages drift past
Most messages a brand sends do not align, and the model treats that as the normal condition rather than a failure to be fixed with more sending. Increasing volume toward a customer who is not ready does not make them ready. It tends to erode trust through overexposure, which lowers the chance that the next message is trusted.
The value of the model is diagnostic. When results fall away, the useful question is which force moved. High engagement with weak conversion usually points to timing: people trust the source and find the material relevant, but they are not yet deciding. Strong results in one narrow segment that will not spread usually point to trust: the wider audience has not yet granted permission. Wide recognition that rarely converts points the same way. Each diagnosis calls for a different response, and none of them is simply more of everything.
Why the shape is a helix
Trace a brand's messages over time around a customer who keeps moving forward, and the path they form is a spiral wrapped around a straight line. The customer advances; the messages circle. That is the helix, and the geometry is deliberate.
A funnel narrows toward the purchase. A loop returns to the same point on every turn. A helix advances: each turn sits at a different position along the axis than the one before. That is the model's way of saying an aligned interaction does not simply repeat. When credible experiences reinforce one another, the customer's trust baseline rises and the next encounter starts from a higher position. The advance is conditional. Contradiction, silence, or a poor experience can stall it or reverse it.
The helix also does not stop at the purchase. After a customer buys, the Post-Purchase Helix begins the next cycle: trust decays without reinforcement, and a satisfied customer's reviews and referrals enter the information environment as trust for other customers still in motion.
What changes for a business that uses the model
Adopting the Marketing Helix changes the questions a team asks more than the tools it uses. Before deciding what the company should do, describe what the customer is doing. Plan for a range of customer conditions rather than one assumed moment. Treat credibility work as the first test a noticed message has to pass, not a late-stage polish. And read a decline as a signal that a condition moved, not automatically as proof that the work got worse.
The model states this in one line: the customer does not move through marketing stages; marketing must adapt as the customer moves. Alignment is temporary, because the customer, the competitors, and the surrounding information keep changing. A message can stop working without ever becoming wrong. The response is to keep observing and adjusting, which is the practice the framework calls Adaptive Marketing.
Where this does not hold
The Marketing Helix is a descriptive model. It explains how customer attention behaves; it does not prescribe a campaign, a channel mix, or a budget. It will not tell a team what to publish next week without the team doing the work of observing its own customers.
In tightly controlled settings, such as a single regulated sales channel or a contained email sequence to a defined list, sequential stage models still produce useful diagnostics, and the funnel remains a sound description of the final conversion step once a customer is already aligned.
The fair objection is that "customers are in motion" can explain any result after the fact. The discipline that answers it is to state the expected motion in advance and then check it. If revenue falls while every leading indicator held steady, the honest conclusion is that the offer or the execution was the problem, not customer motion.
Shorts from this film
0:19Why do customers fall out of a marketing funnel?
0:15What decides which marketing messages get through?
0:16Why is the Marketing Helix shaped like a helix?Questions
What does the Marketing Helix add to the marketing funnel?
The funnel shows where a customer is in the company's process. The Marketing Helix adds what is happening to that customer: customers are already in motion, and a message tends to be pulled into consideration when trust, relevance, and timing are present at the same moment. The funnel remains useful for measuring the company's process, and the Marketing Helix describes the customer moving through it.
What is signal gravity in the Marketing Helix?
Signal gravity is the Marketing Helix term for the pull a customer exerts on a message that carries trust, relevance, and timing together. The customer draws an aligned message closer instead of the brand pushing it through. The term is an explanatory model of customer behavior, not a claim about physics, and it tends to occur when all three hold at the same moment.
Why is it called a helix and not a loop?
The Marketing Helix takes its name from helical geometry because a helix advances with each turn while a loop returns to the same point. The model uses that shape to show that aligned interactions can compound, raising the customer's trust baseline for the next encounter, while contradiction, silence, or a poor experience can stall or reverse the advance.
Does the Marketing Helix replace the marketing funnel?
No. The marketing funnel is a useful summary of the company's process, and the Marketing Helix keeps it for measuring progression through the company's stages. The Helix describes what is happening inside the funnel: customers can enter from any direction, move out of order, and keep moving after they buy.
Transcript
Google broke marketing. It built an empire at the bottom of the funnel, where the math was easy. Then customers changed how they decide, and the math broke.
Brand was always the foundation. Now it is the whole game. Customers decide what gets their attention.
The Marketing Helix describes what happens inside your funnel. Part one of five: inside the funnel. This is the funnel as it is usually drawn.
Customers are dropped in at the top. Most leave along the way. A few reach a purchase.
But what are customers doing inside it? The customer is not falling. The customer is in motion.
Searching, swiping, comparing, deciding. So turn the funnel on its side. Left to right is time.
The customer arrives already moving, reaches a purchase, and keeps going. Marketing is all around this customer: paid, earned, organic. More messages does not mean more attention.
Then something shakes them. It gets their attention. It hooks them.
Being there is not being noticed. You have to get people to look. Now it moves around the customer: far out at first, then closer.
That moving message is the Helix. Most marketing messages drift past. One is pulled closer.
What makes the difference? Trust. Relevance.
Timing. Trust is the first test. The message is closest while all three hold.
Conditions, not guarantees. With them, a message can be pulled closer with every turn. Without them, it tends to get larger, fainter, and then it is gone.
So keep the funnel to measure. Use the Helix to understand how the customer is moving. This is the Marketing Helix.
The model for customers in motion.
Narration is a synthetic voice.
