Marketing Builds Backwards: Every Strategy Is Understandability, Credibility, Deliverability, and AIDA Has the Order Upside Down
Published: 13 June 2026 Author: Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube® Status: Original concept, first publication
AIDA is one of the oldest frameworks in marketing, and it starts in the wrong place.
Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action: the sequence moves a buyer from not-knowing-you-exist to buying from you. It’s a clean description of the human journey, and it’s been useful for over a century. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong. The problem is that it describes what the customer does, not what the machine needs you to build first.
The machine builds in the opposite direction to the buyer
AI engines, search engines, recommender systems: they all mediate between buyers and brands. They decide who to surface, who to trust, who to recommend. And they can only recommend a brand they have judged, can only judge a brand they have understood, and can only understand a brand whose identity is clear and consistent across the web.
That dependency runs in one direction. Understandability first, Credibility second, Deliverability third.
- Understandability. Does the machine know who you are, what you do, and whom you serve? Before any judgement can attach to you, the machine needs a stable, coherent identity to attach it to.
- Credibility. Does the machine believe you’re good at what you do? Accumulated proof from independent third parties loads the identity the machine has already built.
- Deliverability. Does the machine surface you to the right people at the right moment? Reach is the output of the two layers below it, not a starting point.
Build in that order, and the machine can carry the buyer through their journey. Skip Understandability to go straight to Deliverability, and the investment activates nothing, because there’s nothing yet to activate.
AIDA meets UCD: two flows, one funnel
The buyer descends. The machine ascends.
AIDA describes the customer’s experience correctly: they encounter the brand in a moment of awareness (Deliverability), assess whether it seems right for them (Credibility), and confirm the fit (Understandability) before they buy. The human meets the upper layer first and works down to the foundation.
The machine works in exactly the reverse order, because it has to: it lays the foundation before it can build anything above it.
This is what I named the Counterflow Funnel. One funnel, two simultaneous flows running in opposite directions. The full theoretical account is on Zenodo, with the evidence and the formal model. The short version is this: AIDA describes the journey the buyer takes through the funnel. UCD describes the order in which the machine makes that journey possible.
The strategic consequence: build in dependency order
Most marketing is planned in journey order, because the customer is the centre of the plan. That makes sense for a lot of decisions. For the machine-facing layer, it’s the wrong map.
If your strategy begins with reach (Deliverability) before the machine has a coherent identity for you (Understandability), you’re building the top floor before the foundations. The machine can’t surface a brand it can’t judge, and it can’t judge a brand it hasn’t understood.
The Kalicube® Process applies this in practice: BOFU first, because Understandability is where the machine’s trust in you begins. Credibility follows, because accumulated third-party proof is what converts machine understanding into machine confidence. Deliverability comes last, as the outcome of the two layers beneath it.
For me, the cleanest way to describe it is this: AIDA is what the customer does. UCD is what you build so the machine can let them do it.
This is an original concept, first published here on [date]. The formal theoretical paper, including the two-flow model and the historical evidence from the public capability sequence of web search, is The Counterflow Funnel (Barnard, 2026), deposited on Zenodo.
