From the Gravity Funnel to Fly By Gravity
The Gravity Funnel named the mechanism: pull, not push. But a pull has a source. Naming it meant turning away from the act of capturing demand and toward the thing that generates it. The attraction had to be named on its own terms. That name was Fly By Gravity.
This essay is part of the Marketing Helix development history. It records how the thinking moved at the time, including an argument against the funnel that the model no longer makes: the funnel is kept, and the Helix describes what happens inside it. The current model is in the sixteen principles. The full record is the Model History.
In one line
Fly By Gravity named the source of the pull: accumulated trust acts as mass, so brands move customers by what they have earned, not what they spend. It is a legacy step; the attraction it described now lives inside the canonical Marketing Helix.
The previous essay ended on a debt. The Gravity Funnel had replaced applied force with earned attraction, which was the right move, but it described the attraction at the point of capture: the moment a warm prospect arrives and the system converts them. It treated gravity as a condition that happened to be present. It did not explain where the gravity came from, or why it was stronger for some brands than for others with deeper pockets.
That unanswered question is not a detail. It is the whole game. If you cannot say what produces the pull, you cannot build it deliberately. You can only notice it after the fact and hope it returns. To make attraction something a brand constructs rather than stumbles into, the attraction itself had to become the subject.
Trust is the mass.
Return to the physics the Gravity Funnel borrowed. Gravity is not a property of empty space. It is produced by mass. The more mass an object has, the deeper the well around it, and the more strongly other objects fall toward it, with no ongoing effort by the massive object at all. The well is simply there, a standing consequence of what the object is.
The marketing analog, stated plainly, is the core claim of Fly By Gravity: accumulated trust is mass. A brand that has consistently shown up, kept its promises, published credibly in its domain, and been vouched for by the people it served has accumulated trust the way an object accumulates mass. That trust bends the space around the brand. The brand moves demand not by what it spends, but by what it has become.
The Gravity Well
Trust accumulates as mass at the center. The well around it is not engineered in a single campaign: it forms over time, and once formed it draws aligned demand inward without continuous force. This is the source the Gravity Funnel could capture but could not explain.
Naming the attraction changes the job.
Naming attraction as earned mass reorganizes the whole job of marketing. Spend stops being the engine and becomes, at most, a way to make existing mass visible faster. The work that compounds is the work that adds mass: kept promises, credible content, real proof, advocates. Each is small on the day it happens and enormous in aggregate, because mass accumulates and the well it produces deepens.
A brand does not move customers by pushing them. It moves them by becoming something they fall toward. The budget is not the mass. The trust is the mass.
This is why the asymmetry between brands compounds rather than evening out. A brand investing in trust is buying more than this quarter's attention; it is increasing the mass that makes every future encounter more probable and less expensive. Fly By Gravity was the framework that made this attraction the explicit subject.
Trust Compounding
Each aligned encounter returns a little more than the last. The rising line is not a campaign; it is mass accumulating. Attraction grows because trust compounds, and the well deepens with every kept promise.
A field is still a snapshot.
Fly By Gravity got the mechanism and its source right. What it still held was a static picture. A gravity well is a snapshot: a mass, a field, objects falling in. But the object falling in is a customer, and customers do not hold still long enough to be a snapshot. They are in continuous motion, their readiness changing for reasons the brand never sees.
And the encounters between brand and customer do not simply repeat the same fall. Each aligned encounter that lands raises the baseline for the next one. The system advances; it does not loop. A well drawn as rings on a plane cannot show advancement through time. To hold the attraction and the motion and the compounding at once, the geometry had to leave the flat plane and rise.
The Customer in Motion
The customer advances through time, never pausing at a fixed orbit. The solid line behind is the path already traveled; the dashed line ahead is the path still to come. A static well cannot hold this. The next essay can.
Why Fly By Gravity could not be the final word.
Attraction, motion, and compounding are three facts that a flat field cannot carry together. Attraction wants to be drawn as an orbit. Compounding wants to be drawn as a rising line. The only shape that does both at once, circling a center while climbing an axis, is a helix. Naming that shape is the final essay in this lineage.
Where the line resolves.
From the Funnel to the Gravity Funnel
Where the reasoning began: the funnel describes the end, not the beginning. The first correction replaced push with pull.
Read essay one →From Fly By Gravity to the Marketing Helix
The customer is in motion and aligned encounters compound. The helix holds attraction, motion, and compounding in one geometry. The final model.
Read essay three →