Shocking: Marketing Has Many Meanings

A funny thing happened this weekend. I was accepting a connection invite on LinkedIn and I stumbled upon a post from the CMO Network. The question asked was, “What does marketing mean to you in one or two words?” Well, I couldn’t resist—it was like a giant magnet pulling me in. Imagine my surprise when I saw more than 1,300 replies. Let’s be honest, my weekend was not so boring that I read all 1,300, but I read a bunch (that’s a technical term). Actually, I read enough to realize that there are a lot of different thoughts on what marketing means.

Of course, I couldn’t really leave it at that. I actually extracted all of these one- and two-word answers from the post and started slicing and dicing them. Why? I was curious if there were trends across all of these people on this topic.

After weeding out the silly/crazy answers that always find their way into these types of open-question posts, there were some clear trends in thinking:

1. There was a pretty equal balance between the use of words like “profit," "revenue" and "sales” with the use of “customer" and "consumer” in the replies. I think this is a great sign because, as we all know, whether you are a nonprofit organization or a commercial company the revenue and profit only comes from building the right relationships with the marketplace.

2. I’m betting that several years ago if this same question was asked, there would not be many answers that included words like “engagement,” “connection” and “experience,” but in today’s marketing environment these words were present across many of the answers. This too is a great sign that the old marketing formulas of “direct to consumer” have been greatly adjusted by the power of social media, peer networking, etc.

3. As always, there were many references to “brand” when people explained what marketing meant to them: brand advocacy, brand appropriate, brand awareness, brand communication, brand connectivity, brand equity, brand establishing, brand love, brand profit, and the list goes on and on. I’ll probably get myself in trouble with some branding folks, but when you ask a question about a word that has many different definitions across the various industries and you answer using another word that has so many different interpretations (brand), this just creates more confusion. I’m not saying that marketing is not connected to branding, but I am saying we need to be more specific. If someone posted, “What does brand mean to you,” I would expect the same kind of replies with many different answers. In other words, using one to help define the other just seems to create more confusion.

4. Finally, there were many answers that seemed to be versions of “creating demand." Of course, this definitely resonates with a very large piece of the marketing puzzle, but not the full puzzle.