There is no single official "6 A's of marketing". Three different frameworks use the name. The best documented is the six A's of marketing performance management: alignment, accountability, analytics, automation, alliances and assessment. If you mean the customer journey, you probably want Kotler's 5 A's. Tourism courses use Buhalis's destination 6 A's.
That's the honest answer, and it's worth knowing up front because many pages on this question present one list as the list. Here's each version, what it's useful for, and how the ideas apply if you're marketing a website.
Version 1: The six A's of marketing performance management
This is the version most business and marketing-operations sources mean, and its origin is documented. In a 2012 MarketingProfs article, Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing and Julie Schwartz of ITSMA described their 2012 Marketing Performance Management Study, in which more than 400 business executives and marketers took part. Marketers whose CEOs graded them 90 or higher on a 100-point scale were classed as "A" marketers, and those marketers shared six competencies:
- Alignment. Connecting marketing activity to actual business outcomes, not just to the sales team. If a campaign can't be traced to a business result someone cares about, it isn't aligned.
- Accountability. Owning the numbers. The team commits to outcomes and reports on them honestly, including the ones that didn't work.
- Analytics. The intelligence layer: data management, modelling and insight. This is where the "did it work?" question actually gets answered.
- Automation. The systems and tools that let a small team execute consistently without everything depending on someone remembering.
- Alliances. The partnerships and internal relationships marketing depends on: sales, product, finance and outside partners.
- Assessment. Measuring and evaluating performance, then feeding what you learn back into the next cycle.
The framework targets marketing's oldest weakness: plenty of teams can produce work, but far fewer can prove which of it mattered. Each A is a defence against the same failure, activity that nobody measures and therefore nobody improves. It is one consultancy's model built from survey data, not an academic standard, so treat it as a useful checklist rather than a law.
Where this bites in practice: SEO and content are the classic examples. It's easy to publish for a year and have no idea which pages earned anything. Alignment means deciding upfront what a page is for; analytics and assessment mean checking whether it did that. If you're not sure how to instrument this, the main SEO practices covers what's worth tracking and what's vanity, and how to measure SEO ROI shows how to put a number on it.
Version 2: The customer path, Kotler's 5 A's (often miscounted as 6)
Many people searching for "the 6 A's" are reaching for the customer-path model in Marketing 4.0 by Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan (Wiley, 2016, 208 pages), which has five stages, not six:
- Aware. The customer first encounters your brand.
- Appeal. Something about it holds their attention.
- Ask. They start researching: searching, comparing, asking people they trust.
- Act. They buy, sign up or convert.
- Advocate. If the experience was good, they recommend you to others.
The key idea is that in a connected world the journey doesn't end at purchase. Speaking to the American Marketing Association, Kotler said "the role of marketers is to guide customers throughout their journey from awareness to ultimately advocacy." The old funnel treated the sale as the finish line; the 5 A's treat advocacy as the real goal, because a customer who recommends you feeds new customers back into the awareness stage. It's a loop, not a funnel.
The Ask stage should interest anyone running a website, because "ask" is now mostly a search behaviour. Someone interested in your category researches it on Google, on Reddit and increasingly by asking an AI assistant. Whatever they find at that moment decides whether you make the shortlist. If your competitors answer the questions people ask at that stage and you don't, you lose the customer in a phase you never even saw.
That's why content and search visibility aren't just an awareness play. They're how you survive the research stage. The same logic drives the 4 P's of content marketing and every framework that treats "being findable when someone is deciding" as a distinct job.
Version 3: The 6 A's of a tourism destination
If your course or textbook is about tourism, hospitality or destination management, the 6 A's you want is a different framework entirely: Dimitrios Buhalis's model of what makes a destination viable.
Attractions (natural, cultural or built), Accessibility (can people actually get there), Amenities (accommodation, food, services), Available packages (pre-bundled offers from intermediaries), Activities (things to do once you arrive), and Ancillary services (banks, healthcare and infrastructure that isn't tourist-facing but is needed anyway).
It's useful in its field and has nothing to do with the other two, which is exactly why the "6 A's of marketing" search is so muddled.
Why are there so many marketing frameworks with the same shape?
Because alphabetised frameworks are teaching devices, and every author who wants to make a point adds a letter. Marketing has an unusual number of them: the 4 P's, the 7 pillars, the 4 C's, the 5 C's of content marketing, the 5 A's and three separate 6 A's.
The practical consequence: don't spend energy hunting for the "correct" list. A framework is only doing work for you if it changes a decision. If reading the six A's of performance management makes you check whether you can actually attribute last quarter's results, it earned its keep. If it just gave you a slide, it didn't.
How do you actually use one of these?
Pick the version that matches your problem and run it as an audit rather than a poster:
- If you can't prove marketing is working, use version 1. Go A by A and score yourself honestly. Many teams find they're strong on automation and weak on alignment and assessment: plenty of activity, no clear line to outcomes.
- If you're losing deals you never saw, use version 2. Map where your customers go during the Ask stage and check whether you exist there. For most businesses that means search results, comparison content and third-party mentions.
- If you're building an audience from zero, work backwards from Advocate. The cheapest growth is people recommending you, and that's earned in the product and the experience, not the ad.
There's a specific version of the Ask-stage problem that trips up new sites: you can publish good research-stage content and still be invisible, because search engines don't yet have much reason to trust the domain it lives on. That trust comes largely from other credible sites linking to you, and you can find the backlinks to your site for free in Google Search Console to see where you start. Backlinkster is built for that gap: site owners in related niches trade in-content backlinks 1-for-1, and each swap is verified by API.
Frequently asked questions
What are the 6 A's of marketing?
The most widely cited version is alignment, accountability, analytics, automation, alliances and assessment, from VisionEdge Marketing's 2012 study with ITSMA. Other sources use the name for Kotler's customer path or for the tourism destination model, so check which one your course or article means.
Is it 5 A's or 6 A's in Kotler's model?
Five. Kotler's customer path in Marketing 4.0 is aware, appeal, ask, act and advocate. Lists that add a sixth A to it are mixing it up with one of the other frameworks.
What are the 6 A's of tourism?
Attractions, accessibility, amenities, available packages, activities and ancillary services. It is Dimitrios Buhalis's model of what a destination needs to offer, and it is used in tourism and hospitality marketing rather than general marketing.
Which 6 A's framework should a small business use?
Use the performance management version if your problem is proving what works, and Kotler's 5 A's if your problem is being found while customers research. Most small businesses get more from the second, because the Ask stage is where search and reviews decide the shortlist.
The short answer
There's no canonical 6 A's of marketing. The business-strategy version is alignment, accountability, analytics, automation, alliances, assessment, a framework for making marketing measurable. The customer-journey version people often mean is Kotler's five A's: aware, appeal, ask, act, advocate. The tourism version is Buhalis's destination model. All three are legitimate; none of them is the one true list, and the useful move is to pick the one that answers the question you actually have.
Related: What are the 7 pillars of marketing? · The 5 C's of content marketing · What is the #1 rule of marketing?