The Lineage of the Marketing Helix
One model went through four names as it was worked out in public: the marketing funnel, then the Gravity Funnel, then Fly By Gravity, and finally the Marketing Helix. These three essays trace that line. The earlier names are recorded here as legacy. The Marketing Helix is the canonical, final version of the model.
The lineage in one line
The Marketing Funnel Legacy → The Gravity Funnel Legacy → Fly By Gravity Legacy → The Marketing Helix Canonical. Four names, one model. The earlier three are legacy. The Marketing Helix is the authoritative, final version.
Ideas do not arrive finished. The framework now called the Marketing Helix took its current shape across four named attempts, each of which corrected a specific limitation in the one before it. This series documents that correction sequence directly, so that the relationship between the names is unambiguous: each earlier name is a stage in the reasoning, not a competing product, and the Marketing Helix is where the reasoning settled.
We keep the earlier names live for history. The funnel remains a useful operational picture of the final conversion step. The Gravity Funnel and Fly By Gravity are preserved as the record of how the thinking advanced. None of them is the current model. When you need the model for customers in motion, the answer is the Marketing Helix.
Four names, one line of reasoning.
01 · From the Funnel to the Gravity Funnel Legacy origin
The funnel describes what happens at the end, when an already aligned customer decides. It does not describe what makes a customer arrive aligned. The first correction was to stop pushing customers down a pipe and start earning the pull that brings them in. That correction was named the Gravity Funnel.
Read the essay →02 · From the Gravity Funnel to Fly By Gravity Legacy
Gravity explained the conversion moment, but the pull had a source: accumulated trust acting as mass. Naming the force meant naming the attraction itself, not just the capture of it. Fly By Gravity isolated the attraction idea: brands move customers by what they have earned, not by what they spend.
Read the essay →03 · From Fly By Gravity to the Marketing Helix Canonical
Attraction was still a snapshot. Customers are not still: they are in continuous motion, and aligned encounters compound rather than repeat. A helix, not a loop and not a line, is the geometry that holds both. The Marketing Helix absorbs every prior idea: gravity, attraction, conversion: into one model. This is the final version.
Read the essay →The complete Marketing Helix. The customer advances along the helix while three orbital forces: trust, relevance, and timing: tighten until a message is pulled into active consideration. Everything the earlier names reached for is contained here.