What is Marketing?

Even as someone who has worked in marketing for half a decade now,

I’ve always had trouble pinpointing exactly what the term means.

Here are a few definitions we can look up quickly:

According to Claude.ai:

“Marketing is the set of activities and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

According to a Google Search:

"the activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”

I believe that defining the term properly can really help us in getting an idea of what work needs to be done and what work qualifies as marketing.

I also believe that properly defining what marketing isn’t will be very helpful.

So to start with the via negativa (in the words of Nassim Taleb) I’m going to start first with what marketing isn’t.

Marketing isn’t manipulation.

Marketing isn’t trickery.

The goal of marketing is not to pull the wool over the eyes of the customer.

Marketing isn’t Jordan Belfort selling someone a pen they already have for a price that is way more than the pen is worth.

Marketing isn’t a Stripe dashboard showing how much money someone made last month.

Marketing isn’t a Lamborghini in the background of your video.

Marketing also isn’t sales.

That one can be quite complicated, but if we tie marketing too strongly to sales we are almost giving it too much credit.

There are so many aspects that happen in a sale that narrowing it down to one marketing activity or another is an extremely reductionist view of why a customer may buy.

There are many factors outside of marketing that determine if a customer buys.

Things like market conditions, seasonality, pricing, the quality of the product itself, etc…

For us to have effective marketing, we must have an idea and definition of the scope of what it can accomplish.

That is why I am proposing to refine the definitions of marketing.

If we read the above examples from Claude and Google, these don’t do a great job either.

They both associate marketing with the act of selling itself.

Here are the definitions I am proposing:

Marketing is communication.

Marketing is storytelling.

Marketing is presenting your product or service in the best possible light while remaining grounded in the truth of your business.

I believe that separating marketing from the purchase actions the customer takes is giving ourselves the best opportunity to succeed and improve.

Instead of asking: Did I get the sale?

We can ask ourselves: How well did I communicate my message?

How well did I craft the story of my product?

How well did I paint the picture of the journey a customer will go on?

By reframing marketing from “Did I get the sale” to questions like these we give ourselves more agency to improve.

As each customer or prospect is different, we can never truly know the reason they didn’t purchase.

Even if we send out surveys or questionnaires to all prospects after they still are unlikely to tell us the true reasons.

With a focus on whether we sold the prospect, we are focusing too much on our persuasive abilities.

In my view, many focus much too much on these persuasive abilities in marketing.

This frame makes us believe we must be some expert persuader, like a top-tier lawyer swaying the audience and the jury. Or a politician who can so easily manipulate a crowd.

Rather than looking to persuade, I think it is much better to focus on what we present.

Paint the picture of our product or service in the best possible light.

Speak of the problems it may address and the solutions that come with it.

Show the audience what they can expect and how these solutions come about.

But ultimately, the decision lies in the hands of the customer.

Take the pressure off yourself in believing you must convince them to buy your product.

Instead focus on how well you are communicating your message, values, goals, and solutions.

Ultimately, we must believe that every human is choosing for themselves whether they are buying some product or service.

Rather than becoming a master manipulator become a master communicator.

That is why in redefining marketing I focus on marketing as how well we communicate the truths around our product rather than how well our words manipulate and sell.