Mike Millett and the Marketing Helix
The Marketing Helix is the customer behaviour model developed by Mike Millett. The model for customers in motion.
The Marketing Helix is a customer behaviour model developed by Mike Millett. Trust, relevance and timing together determine whether a customer moves closer to a brand, drifts away, or returns as conditions change. All three have to be present at once for alignment to occur, and alignment is temporary.
The model for customers in motion.
The Marketing Helix
The observation underneath it
Customers arrive carrying priorities, beliefs, pressures, relationships and experiences the brand did not arrange and cannot see. They do not begin at the top of a company-controlled funnel, because there is no such thing from where they are standing.
Somebody can meet a category through a podcast, form a strong preference from a forum thread, and arrive at a website already mostly decided, without ever touching the top of the funnel anyone designed for them. The funnel is not wrong so much as it is a diagram of the company's hopes rather than the customer's behaviour.
A helix, not a circle: they return to the same questions at a different altitude, knowing more each time and trusting more or less than they did before.
Why it is a model and not a method
It prescribes nothing. It describes what customers do, and every practical claim elsewhere in this body of work has to answer to it. Adaptive Brand Management is the organisational response to it, and Trust-First Marketing is the sequencing that follows from it.
That order matters. A method with no observation under it is a preference.
Where the canonical material lives
The full framework, its research and its supporting essays are published on Marketing Helix, which holds the intellectual authority for the model and also publishes the Adaptive Brand Management foundations paper. This page establishes authorship and deliberately does not restate the framework.