#002: 5 Stages of Awareness
Origin: Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising (1966)
It’s great for:
Writing ad copy
Designing audience segments
Creating educational materials
Eugene’s model is a strong complement to the traditional marketing funnel—it adds more behavioral nuance to each stage and is more practical to apply (in my opinion).
I always wanted to read the source, but used copies of Breakthrough Advertising go for >$400 on Amazon. So, if anyone ever wanted to get me a rad gift… you know where to look.
Here’s the gist of how it works:
Every buyer follows a five-stage journey of progressive awareness—from discovering a painful problem to purchasing a solution. Although the model came from the pre-internet era, the core principles are still true today:
Meet people where they are
Every buyer is on a unique awareness journey and is looking for information to solidify their understanding of the problem (h/t: They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan), the solution category, and tradeoffs of potential products. The more precisely you can segment on awareness and then deliver messages that line up with conversations already happening in your prospects’ heads, the better your chances of resonating.
Guide them on their journey
Marketing programs should prioritize capturing buyers’ existing attention (also see the Ehrenberg Bass 95-5 rule) at specific awareness stages, then shepherding people through the remaining stages. This also means maintaining a complete library of messaging spanning each stage—i.e. Educational and diagnostic content for the problem-aware, solution-alternative information for people who can name their problem, and detailed product specifications for people comparing direct alternatives to your product.
Like most models, this doesn’t account for every scenario. Here are a few things I like to keep in mind when I layer it onto my work:
B2B purchases usually involve multiple people with different awareness levels and priorities. This model takes a single-player view into the buying process. It works nicely when you apply it to scenarios where you’re conversing 1:1, but it needs modification to account for a multiple-person buying team.
This model takes a more traditional view of marketing and sales interactions. In today's world, buyers are much more independent with information gathering. It's common for them to source pieces from different places and skip stages or jump between them very quickly, which can disrupt the smooth progression the model assumes.
Information is hyper-available and decentralized. Buyers can get peer feedback from third-party information sources (review sites, Reddit, Slack communities), which companies can only control through a second-order effect. Controlling narratives in the first four stages of the model is tricky and requires a lot of focused effort and tact.
