By: Dony Saputra, MM, MKom
Sugiyama and Lee (2011:77-78) write that the AIDMA model was first advocated by Roland Hall in the United States in around 1920, and is still used extensively to this day. The AIDMA model describes the following steps from the point where a consumer notices a product, service, or advertisement up to the purchase:
Attention → Interest → Desire → Memory → Action
Advertising served to get the consumer’s attention, and create some interest which would, hopefully, turn to desire. If the advertisement was effective, that desire would be committed to memory and hopefully remembered long enough so that the consumer would make the action—buy that product or brand—upon his or her next visit to the store. AIDMA is a simple but effective model for traditional advertising of relatively simple products where the real objective is to get the consumer to choose your brand from among many choices. It assumes that the information provided by the company through the advertisement is all that a consumer needs, and the objective is, as much as anything, to get the consumer to remember the brand and the brand promise at the point of purchase.
The advertising models of many consumer products companies for years have been based on this model. The AIDMA model may work for companies where consumers have little reason to learn more about products beyond the advertising message before their purchase. In the Internet era, however, where anyone can easily access information, we have seen a great proliferation of what we call “active contact with information,” that is, after consumers notice a product, service, or advertisement, they voluntarily dig deeper, and share with others the intriguing information that they have obtained. In addition to the flow of information from companies (the senders) to the consumers (the receivers), two unique behaviors of consumers themselves— searching for (i.e., gathering) and sharing information—have become important factors in the purchase decision.
Based on these changes in the information environment, Dentsu now advocates a new consumption behavior model called AISAS (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share). If this new consumption behavior model or AISAS (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share) compared to AIDMA, we would see that the psychological transformation process (A→I→D→M) has been scaled back, and the based on these changes in the information environment, Dentsu now advocates a new consumption behavior model called AISAS (Attention, Interest, Search, Action, Share). And the model becomes:
Attention → Interest → Search → Action → Share
AISAS as a Nonlinear Model
Fundamentally, the AIDMA model is linear; it represents a step-by- step process, starting with “attention” and finishing with ”action.” However the AISAS model does not necessarily move through each of the five stages, Attention → Interest → Search → Action → Share. A step may be skipped, or it may be repeated. For instance, the consumer might see a television commercial for a similar product, and immediately go to the store to buy it (Attention → Interest → Action), or he or she might be so interested in the actress appearing in the television commercial that he or she sits right down at his or her PC to write about the commercial in his or her blog (Attention → Interest → Share).
Sugiyama.K, Andree. T (2011), The Dentsu way: Secrets of CrossSwitch Marketing from world Most Innovative Advertising agency.