From Fly By Gravity to the Marketing Helix
Fly By Gravity named the pull and its source. What it could not show was time. The customer is never still, and aligned encounters do not repeat: they compound. The geometry that holds attraction, motion, and compounding at once is not a loop and not a line. It is a helix. This is where the lineage ends and the canonical model begins.
In one line
The Marketing Helix is the canonical, final model for customers in motion. Because customers move continuously and aligned encounters compound, the geometry must climb as it circles: a helix. It absorbs and supersedes the marketing funnel, the Gravity Funnel, and Fly By Gravity. Read the model →
Two corrections are now behind us. The funnel became the Gravity Funnel when push gave way to pull. The Gravity Funnel became Fly By Gravity when the pull was traced to its source: trust acting as mass. Each correction was real, and each left one thing unresolved. Fly By Gravity's unresolved thing is the hardest and the most important: time.
A gravity well is a picture of a single instant. The object being drawn in is a person, and people are never frozen. Their attention, readiness, and trust move continuously. And the encounters between a brand and a customer are not a loop of the same fall replayed: each aligned encounter changes the starting conditions of the next. The relationship does not return to where it began. It advances.
Two things a flat picture cannot hold.
Any honest model has to carry two facts a flat gravity well drops. First, customer motion: the customer is always somewhere in continuous movement, not waiting at a stage or hovering at a fixed orbit. Second, compounding: aligned encounters raise a baseline rather than repeating an outcome, so the system climbs over time instead of circling in place.
Picture drawing both at once. Attraction wants to be an orbit, something circling a center. Compounding wants to be a rising line, something advancing upward. A circle alone cannot climb. A line alone cannot orbit. The only shape that does both, circling a center while advancing along an axis, is a helix. The geometry was not chosen for elegance. It was forced by the two facts the earlier models could not hold together.
The Customer in Motion
The customer advances forward through time, never pausing. A flat well shows attraction at an instant; it cannot show this advance. The helix adds the axis of time that the well was missing.
The helix absorbs everything before it.
The decisive property of the Marketing Helix is that it does not discard the earlier models. It contains them. The funnel's real insight, that there is a decision moment where an aligned customer commits, survives as a single point on the helix path. The Gravity Funnel's insight, that demand is pulled and must be captured when it converges, survives as the moment the orbits tighten into selection. Fly By Gravity's insight, that trust is the mass generating the pull, survives as the force that decides how tightly the orbits draw in.
What the helix adds is the axis of time that makes all three cohere. Three forces, trust, relevance, and timing, orbit the customer at every moment of motion. When all three align above threshold, the message is pulled into active consideration. And because each aligned encounter raises the trust baseline, the next revolution begins from a higher position than the last.
The Three Forces in Orbit
Trust, relevance, and timing orbit the customer at every moment of motion. The pull Fly By Gravity described is resolved here into three named forces. When they converge above threshold, the message is selected.
A loop returns. A helix advances.
A loop returns to the same point with each revolution. A helix advances: every revolution sits higher along the axis than the one before. That is the difference between a brand that repeats its marketing and a brand whose trust compounds.
The Marketing Helix is not the next brand in a sequence of brands. It is the point at which the sequence resolved. Each earlier name solved one problem and revealed the next; the helix is where no next problem of the same kind remained, because motion and compounding were the last missing pieces and the helix holds them both. The gravity idea now lives inside it as signal gravity. The attraction idea lives inside it as the trust force. The conversion idea lives inside it as the selection moment.
The Well Uncoils
Lift the flat gravity well off the plane and let it advance through time, and the rings become a spiral that climbs. Attraction is preserved; motion and compounding are added. The static well becomes a path.
One concrete case: the loop and the climb.
Take two firms in the same market, spending the same amount, working equally hard. Call them the Loop and the Climb.
The Loop treats every quarter as a fresh start. It runs the same campaign to the same cold audience, buys the same attention at the same price, and when the quarter ends it returns almost exactly to where it began. Its content comes down when the campaign stops. Its happy customers are never asked to leave a trace. Nothing it did in the spring is still working for it in the fall. Each revolution lands on the same ring: this is a loop, and a loop is expensive forever, because it pays full price for attention every single time.
The Climb spends the same budget but lets each aligned encounter raise the baseline. Every satisfied client is invited to leave a public review. Every explainer it publishes stays up, gets cited, and is corroborated by a third party. Every clear answer it gives becomes a source an AI engine can quote months later. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they mean the next quarter does not start cold: prospects arrive already half convinced by evidence the firm laid down earlier, and the three forces, trust, relevance, and timing, converge faster because trust is already high. Same effort per cycle, but each cycle begins higher than the last.
After two years the two firms are not slightly apart. They are on different geometries. The Loop is still paying full freight for every click. The Climb is pulled toward buyers it never directly contacted, carried by trust it banked quarters ago. The difference was never the size of the budget. It was whether the work compounded. The Loop ran a circle. The Climb ran a helix.
Why this is the canonical, final version.
The earlier names remain on the public record, and they remain useful in their narrow original roles: the funnel as a picture of the decision step, the Gravity Funnel as an applied conversion system, Fly By Gravity as the language of attraction. But as the model of customer behavior, there is one current answer. When you need to describe how customers actually move and what determines whether your message is pulled closer or ignored, the answer is the Marketing Helix: the model for customers in motion.
The customer advances along the helix through time. Three orbital forces tighten as alignment builds, converging at the decision point. The post-purchase arc returns trust to the start of the next cycle, higher than the last. Every prior name in the lineage is contained in this one picture.
The Marketing Helix, answered plainly.
Why is the model a helix and not a funnel?
A funnel is a static picture of stages a customer passes through once. It cannot show two facts that decide real outcomes: that the customer is always in motion, and that aligned encounters compound rather than repeat. A helix holds both at once, because it circles a center while climbing an axis. The customer advances through time, which is the climb, while trust, relevance, and timing orbit them, which is the circle. See the helix compared to the funnel.
What does it mean that aligned encounters compound?
Every time a brand meets a customer with the right message at the right moment and earns trust, it does not return to the starting line. It raises the baseline. The next encounter begins from a higher position, so the same effort produces a larger effect over time. Compounding is the reason the geometry has to climb: a model that only circled would describe a brand that never gets easier to buy from.
Is the Marketing Helix the same as the Gravity Funnel or Fly By Gravity?
They are earlier names in one lineage, not competing models. The funnel became the Gravity Funnel when push gave way to pull; the Gravity Funnel then became Fly By Gravity when the pull was traced to trust acting like mass. Fly By Gravity is absorbed here, with the axis of time added to make the earlier ideas cohere. As a description of customer behavior, the Marketing Helix is the canonical, current term; the earlier names remain useful only in their narrow original roles.
What are the three forces in the Marketing Helix?
Trust, relevance, and timing. They orbit the customer at every moment of motion. When all three align above threshold, the message is pulled into active consideration; when any one is missing, it fades outward. Trust is the strongest source of pull, and because it compounds, it is the force that decides how tightly the orbits draw in on each revolution.
How the model was worked out.
From the Funnel to the Gravity Funnel
The funnel describes the end, not the beginning. The first correction replaced push with pull.
Read essay one →From the Gravity Funnel to Fly By Gravity
The pull has a source. Trust is the mass. Naming the attraction made it something a brand can build.
Read essay two →