Hierarchy of Effects (Lavidge & Steiner, 1961)
Six ordered rungs from stranger to buyer — Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction, Purchase — grouped into three psychological stages: cognitive (think), affective (feel), conative (do). Advertising's job is to move prospects up one rung at a time.
Where superseded. The strict think to feel to do order was shown to be contingent, not universal: the fcb-grid demonstrated that low-involvement goods run do to feel to think, inverting the sequence. So the ladder is real but its rung order depends on involvement.
Transfer. The framework separates three things agent content silently collapses: knowing a product exists is not liking it, and liking is not acting. Most AI-produced awareness content stops at Awareness and Knowledge — it informs — and never earns Liking or Preference. That gap is precisely anti-mid: competent, informative, unloved. The rungs let you name which stage a piece actually works on, and forbid skipping. If your content assumes Conviction from a reader who has no Knowledge yet, it reads as a pitch to a stranger.