My Marketing Thoughts

Stages of Consumer Awareness

A common approach to marketing is through the customer journey. Broadly speaking, it goes from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action to Post Action. This seems to be a modification of the sales funnel idea, in that a customer moves from one stage to the next, similar to falling down a funnel. The customer journey works by making your customers aware that your company exists, creating interest in the solution you offer them, making it easy for them to take action, then keeping those customers you earned in the loop for recurring purchases (post action).


I think the inexact origins of the customer journey come from a classic book on advertising called “Breakthrough Advertising.” The author, Eugene Schwartz, says one of the necessary steps in building a great ad is to find out what stage of awareness your customers are in. Below are the stages with a line that summarizes what you need to do at each stage.


His stages of awareness are:

  1. Most aware

    1. Your customer is fully aware of what your product does and knows they could use it. They just need a bit more incentive to get moving.

  2. The customer knows of the product but doesn’t yet want it

    1. Your customer isn’t convinced how your product helps them, or how effective it is at helping them.

  3. How to introduce new products

    1. You’ve tapped into a want, now connect your product to that want.

  4. How to introduce products that solve needs

    1. Your customer is vaguely aware of their need and has no connection to your product.

  5. How to open up a completely unaware market

    1. “You are selling nothing, promising nothing, or satisfying anything. Instead you are echoing emotion, an attitude, a dissatisfaction…”


To expand on these stages of awareness, I created posts elaborating on each stage of the journey.

If you know which stage of consumer awareness you would like to start marketing towards, click below to reach out to me.

“Consumers don’t give A’s for effort. Fight on.”

— Lee Clow in Lee Clow’s Beard

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