What getting through means
Reaching a customer and getting through to them are different events. Delivery puts a message in front of someone. Getting through, in the Marketing Helix, means the message is pulled into active consideration: the customer evaluates it, engages with it, and moves toward a decision. Most delivered messages never make that transition, because customers in motion meet far more messages than they could ever consider.
The model describes that transition as a pull from the customer's side. When a message carries trust, relevance, and timing together, the customer draws it closer. The framework calls this signal gravity. It is an explanatory term, not a claim about physics, and it names where the energy comes from: the customer's own attention, not the force of the send.
The order a message is judged in
The three forces are independent, but they act on a noticed message in a recognizable order. Trust is the first test. It is the permission condition: whether the customer allows the source into consideration at all. A message from a source the customer does not yet trust is filtered before it is evaluated, usually without the customer deciding anything consciously. Relevance and timing tend not to get a chance to matter.
Relevance comes next. It is the state-match condition: whether the message fits where the customer actually is in their own thinking. A careful comparison of options is irrelevant to someone still deciding whether they have a problem, and problem framing is irrelevant to someone choosing between two vendors. Relevance belongs to the fit between message and customer, not to the message itself.
Timing is the convergence condition. It asks whether trust and relevance meet while the customer is ready to act. A trusted, relevant message that arrives before readiness may add a little to trust but produces no decision. One that arrives after the customer has already chosen produces no opportunity at all.
Why two out of three is not enough
The forces behave as conditions that all hold at the same moment, not as scores that add up. A message strong on trust and relevance but outside the readiness window does not get two thirds of a result. It gets none. This is the central structural claim of the Marketing Helix, and it is what makes the model useful in practice: when results fall, the question becomes which condition is not holding.
Each failure has a signature. Plenty of engagement with little conversion usually means timing: people trust the source and find the material relevant but are not yet deciding. Strong conversion in one narrow segment that will not spread usually means trust has not been extended to the wider audience. Messages that are trusted and timely but ignored usually mean relevance: the material answers a question the customer has already moved past, or has not reached.
None of the conditions holds still. Trust strengthens or decays, the customer's question moves, and readiness rises and falls on its own schedule. A message that got through last quarter can stop getting through without a single word changing. The full account of each force, and how each is built or lost, is on the Three Forces page.
Where this does not hold
The three conditions describe when a message is pulled into consideration, not whether the customer finally buys. Price, availability, and the offer itself still decide the last step. The diagnostic signatures above are patterns to test, not verdicts: a team should state which condition it believes is not holding and check that prediction before acting on it.
More from The Marketing Helix
1:41What does the Marketing Helix add to the marketing funnel?
0:19Why do customers fall out of a marketing funnel?
0:16Why is the Marketing Helix shaped like a helix?Questions
What makes a marketing message get through to a customer?
In the Marketing Helix, a marketing message the customer has noticed tends to get through when trust, relevance, and timing all hold at the same moment. The customer trusts the source, the message fits their current question, and it arrives while they are ready to act. If any one of the three is missing, the message drifts past regardless of its quality.
Why is trust the first test in the Marketing Helix?
Trust is the first test in the Marketing Helix because a noticed message from a source the customer does not trust tends to be set aside before its relevance or timing is weighed. Being there is not being noticed: the message has to be noticed. That is why credibility work is not a late-stage activity in the Marketing Helix: it decides whether anything that follows is read at all.
What is the gravity in the Marketing Helix?
The gravity in the Marketing Helix is signal gravity: the pull a customer exerts on a message that carries trust, relevance, and timing together. The customer draws an aligned message closer rather than the brand forcing it through. It is an explanatory term for customer behavior, not a physical claim, and it can occur when all three forces hold at the same moment.
Transcript
Three forces decide what gets through. Trust, relevance, and timing. When a message has all three, the customer pulls it closer. That pull is the gravity. The model for customers in motion.
Narration is a synthetic voice.
