Marketing glossary
143 marketing terms in plain words. Each one says where it is used and shows it at work: a formula with a worked sum, a campaign you can watch, or a real brand.
A
A/B testingComparing two or more variants against live traffic split at random, so the difference in results can be attributed to the change rather than to circumstance.Active attentionAttention actually paid to an ad - eyes on the creative - as opposed to the ad merely being on screen and 'viewable'.Ad pre-testingTesting an ad with its audience before money goes behind it, usually by measuring emotional response, branding and recall on a standardised scale.AdvertorialA paid placement written and laid out to read like the publication's own editorial, marked as advertising.Affiliate marketingPaying partners a commission for the customers they send - publishers, creators and comparison sites carry the offer and earn on results.Affinity indexHow much a medium's audience over- or under-represents your target, indexed to 100: an affinity of 130 means the channel's audience contains 30% more of your target than the population does.AI agentAn AI system that pursues a goal through multiple steps and tools - searching, reading, writing, calling APIs - rather than answering one prompt.AI OverviewsGoogle's AI-generated answer box assembled from multiple sources at the top of results.AI slopLow-effort, high-volume AI-generated content flooding feeds and search - generic posts, stock-alike imagery, unedited model output.AngleThe persuasive premise an ad argues from: the specific desire, pain, objection or belief it chooses to address.ARPU (average revenue per user)Average revenue per user: recurring revenue in a period divided by the number of paying customers.ATL/BTL (above/below the line)The old agency split between above-the-line media advertising (TV, print, radio, outdoor, bought for reach) and below-the-line activity (promotions, direct mail, PoS, paid on results or fees).AttributionAssigning credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints that preceded it, by rule (last click, first click, position) or by model.
B
B2B marketingMarketing where the customer is an organisation and the purchase involves committees, longer cycles and bigger tickets.Blue ocean strategyEscaping head-to-head competition by redefining the offer until the market has no direct rival - creating uncontested 'blue' water instead of fighting in the bloody red.Brand archetypesGiving a brand a recognisable character drawn from recurring story figures - Hero, Outlaw, Sage, Jester and the rest of the twelve - so its personality stays coherent across executions.Brand architectureHow a company organises the relationships between its brands: a branded house puts one master brand on everything (Google), a house of brands runs separate consumer brands under an invisible owner (P&G, or Eucalyptus with Juniper and Pilot), with endorsed and sub-brand structures in between.Brand awarenessThe share of category buyers who know the brand exists - measured prompted (they recognise the name from a list) or unprompted (they name it themselves when asked about the category).Brand buildingLong-term marketing that builds memory structures for future buying situations: broad reach, emotional, works over years and shows up in brand metrics before it shows up in sales.Brand equityThe differential effect that knowing the brand has on a customer's response to its marketing: the same product, price and ad work harder when the brand is familiar and positively linked in memory.Brand identityThe full designed system by which a brand presents itself - name, visual identity, tone of voice, sonic assets and behaviour - as distinct from brand image, which is what people actually perceive.Brand liftThe measured change in brand metrics - awareness, ad recall, consideration, intent - caused by a campaign, usually via a survey comparing exposed and unexposed groups.Brand personalityThe set of human characteristics a brand consistently expresses - sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, ruggedness in the classic framework.Brand positioningThe place a brand occupies in the buyer's mind relative to the alternatives - not what you do to the product, but what you do to the mind of the prospect.Brand purposeThe reason a brand claims to exist beyond making money, used as a strategic and creative organising idea.Brand salienceThe propensity of a brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations.Buyer personaA fictional but research-grounded portrait of a target buyer - goals, context, objections, media habits - used to keep teams writing for a person instead of a segment code.
C
Category entry points (CEPs)The thoughts, needs, occasions and cues buyers use to access memory when a category purchase comes up - the 'ways in' to a buying decision.Churn rateThe percentage of customers or revenue lost in a period.Click-through rate (CTR)Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.Consumer insightA true, specific and previously unexploited observation about how people think, feel or behave, sharp enough to build an idea on.Content marketingEarning attention by publishing genuinely useful or entertaining material - guides, tools, shows, newsletters - instead of renting attention with ads.Content pillarsThe three to five recurring themes a brand's content keeps returning to, chosen where audience interest and brand authority overlap.Conversion rateThe percentage of people who complete a desired action out of those who had the chance to: visitors who buy, viewers who click through, sign-ups who activate.CPA (cost per acquisition)Spend divided by the number of conversions it produced - the price of an acquired action, attributed to the channel.CPC (cost per click)What an advertiser pays for one click, either as a bid model or as spend divided by clicks.CPMCost per mille: the price of a thousand impressions.Creative briefThe short document that turns strategy into a creative assignment: the problem, the audience, the single most important thing to say, the evidence for it, and what the work must achieve.Creative consistencyKeeping the same creative platform, assets and style running across campaigns and years instead of reinventing every brief.Creative effectivenessThe degree to which creative quality converts into business results - awareness, share, profit.Creative fatigueThe decay in an ad's performance as its audience sees it too many times: frequency climbs, CTR and hook rate slide, CPMs and CAC creep up.Creative testingThe systematic comparison of ad variants against live results - angles, hooks, formats, creators - to find what resonates before scaling spend.Creator adsAds built with or fronted by content creators, run from the brand's account or boosted from the creator's own handle.CRO (conversion rate optimisation)The systematic practice of raising the share of visitors who act - through testing changes to pages, flows, copy and offers.CTA (call to action)The explicit instruction that tells the audience what to do next - buy, sign up, book, learn more - and the element that turns attention into a measurable response.Customer acquisition cost (CAC)Customer acquisition cost: total acquisition spend divided by the number of new customers it produced in the period.Customer awareness stagesEugene Schwartz's five states a prospect can be in - unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware - each demanding a different message: you cannot sell a solution to someone who has not noticed the problem.Customer journeyThe sequence of contacts a person has with a brand from first exposure to purchase and beyond, mapped across channels and moments.Customer lifetime value (LTV)Customer lifetime value: the profit a customer generates over their whole relationship with the brand, discounted to today.Customer retentionKeeping the customers you have - measured as the share still active or still paying after a period.
D
Dark socialSharing that analytics cannot see: links passed through DMs, group chats, email and screenshots, arriving as 'direct' traffic.Demand generationThe wider discipline of creating want for the category and brand before anyone fills a form - content, brand media, community, education - of which lead capture is only the harvesting end.DifferentiationBeing meaningfully different from competitors on something buyers value - the classic strategy of winning by offering what others do not.Direct response advertisingAdvertising built to trigger an immediate, measurable action - click, sign-up, purchase - with a clear offer and call to action.Display advertisingVisual ads - banners, rich media, video units - bought on websites and apps, historically the workhorse of programmatic.Distinctive brand assetsThe non-name elements a brand owns in memory - colours, logos, characters, sounds, taglines, packaging shapes - that trigger the brand without spelling it out.DistinctivenessBeing instantly recognisable as yourself, regardless of whether you are different: the property distinctive assets exist to build.Dull advertising (the cost of dull)Work that provokes no feeling at all - and is therefore ignored.
E
Earned mediaExposure a brand did not pay for and does not own: press coverage, word of mouth, shares, reviews, creator mentions.EmbeddingsNumeric representations of text or images that place similar meanings near each other, so 'brand salience' and 'mental availability' sit close without sharing a word.Emotional advertisingAdvertising that works by making people feel rather than by making claims - humour, warmth, story, spectacle.Engagement rateInteractions divided by reach or followers - likes, comments, shares, saves as a share of the people who saw the post.Evergreen contentContent whose relevance does not decay - guides, definitions, evergreen questions - as opposed to news and trend content that spikes and dies.Excess share of voice (ESOV)Share of voice minus share of market.
F
Fame (in advertising)In effectiveness research, a campaign's ability to get a brand talked about - to become culturally salient beyond its media spend.Fine-tuningFurther training a model on your own examples so a style or task becomes default behaviour, versus steering it per-request with prompts and context.Fluent deviceA recurring character or dramatic scenario a brand runs across campaigns - a mascot, a running joke, a familiar situation.FMCGFast-moving consumer goods: low-price, high-frequency packaged products - food, drink, household, personal care - sold mainly through retail.FrequencyThe average number of times a reached person is exposed to a campaign in a period.Future demandThe 85-95% of a category's buyers who are not in market today but will be at some point - the audience brand building exists to pre-sell.
G
Generative AIAI that produces new content - text, images, video, audio, code - from learned patterns rather than retrieving existing material.Generative engine optimisation (GEO)Optimising to be cited by AI answers - Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity - rather than merely ranked in blue links.Go-to-market strategyThe plan for how a product reaches its buyers and earns adoption: the audience, positioning, pricing, channels, sales motion and launch sequencing, as one coherent argument.Golden CircleSimon Sinek's model that communication should move from why (belief) through how to what (product), because 'people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it'.GRP (gross rating point)The classic currency of broadcast reach: one GRP equals reaching 1% of the target audience once, so GRPs = reach x frequency.
H
HallucinationA model stating something false with full fluency and confidence - invented statistics, sources, features or events.Halo effectThe spillover of one impression onto another channel's measured performance: a TV campaign runs and survey respondents say they heard about you on Instagram, search conversions spike, and the platforms book the credit.Hold rateThe share of viewers still watching deeper into a video ad, commonly measured at 15 seconds or as ThruPlay completion.HookThe opening device of an ad - the first seconds, frame or line whose only job is to earn the next few seconds of attention.Hook rateThe share of people who stay past the first moments of a video ad, commonly the first three seconds, out of those it was served to.
I
Inbound marketingBeing found by buyers who are already looking - through search content, resources and tools that answer their questions - rather than interrupting people who were not.IncrementalityThe portion of an outcome that would not have happened without the marketing.Influencer marketingPartnering with people who hold an audience's attention and trust to carry the brand's message - from celebrity endorsement's descendant to long-tail creator programmes.
J
K
L
Landing pageA page built for one campaign and one action, stripped of the site's usual navigation and choices.Large language model (LLM)A model trained on vast text corpora to predict language, which turns out to cover writing, summarising, reasoning and conversation - GPT, Claude and Gemini are LLMs.Lead generationActivity that captures identifiable prospective customers - names, emails, companies - for sales or nurture to work on.Lead nurturingStaying usefully present with leads who are not ready yet - sequenced emails, content, retargeting - until buying intent forms.Lead scoringRanking leads by how much their profile and behaviour resemble buyers - title, company fit, pages visited, emails opened - so sales works the likeliest first.LTV:CAC ratioLifetime value divided by acquisition cost - the core unit economic in any board pack.
M
Market penetrationThe percentage of all category buyers who bought your brand at least once in a given period.Market shareA brand's sales as a percentage of total category sales in a period, in value or volume.Market sophisticationSchwartz's other axis: how many similar claims the market has already heard.Marketing flywheelHubSpot's replacement for the funnel: instead of ending at purchase, happy customers feed growth through referrals, reviews and expansion, so the model is a wheel that spins faster as friction is removed.Marketing funnelThe model of the path from stranger to customer - awareness, consideration, preference, purchase, and in modern versions retention and advocacy.Marketing mix modeling (MMM)Econometric modelling that estimates each marketing and non-marketing input's contribution to sales from historical data - media by channel, price, promotions, seasonality, competitors.Marketing ROIProfit attributable to marketing divided by its cost - the return on the spend, in margin terms.Media buyingPurchasing the advertising space and time the plan calls for - negotiating rates, placing orders, or trading programmatically - and stewarding the spend as it runs.Media planningDeciding where, when and how often a campaign should appear to reach its audience efficiently: channel mix, budget split, timing, reach and frequency goals.Mental availabilityHow readily a brand comes to mind across the buying situations of its category, built from the number and freshness of memory links between the brand and category entry points.MER (marketing efficiency ratio)Marketing efficiency ratio, also called blended ROAS: total revenue divided by total marketing spend, no attribution involved.Moment marketing (reactive marketing)Building communications around live cultural, news or seasonal moments rather than a pre-planned calendar - from a single reactive social post to a full campaign triggered by an event.MQL and SQLMarketing qualified lead: someone whose behaviour and fit suggest sales-readiness by marketing's criteria.
N
Native advertisingPaid content designed to match the form and feel of the platform it runs on - sponsored articles, in-feed promoted posts, branded video that reads like editorial.NewsjackingInjecting a brand into a breaking news story to ride its attention - adding the brand's angle while the story is still forming and journalists are still hungry for material.NPS (Net Promoter Score)The share of customers rating 9-10 on 'how likely are you to recommend us' minus the share rating 0-6, on a -100 to +100 scale.
O
OKR (objectives and key results)A goal-setting format pairing one qualitative objective with a few measurable key results that would prove it happened.OOH (out-of-home)Advertising that reaches people outside their homes: billboards, transit, street furniture, and their digital descendants (DOOH).Organic reachThe share of your followers or potential audience a post reaches without paid support.
P
Performance creativeAdvertising built to work inside the performance loop: made fast, tested against live audience response, and iterated on what the data says.Physical availabilityHow easy a brand is to find and buy in the situations where the category is bought: the breadth and depth of distribution, and the brand's presence and prominence within it.PPC (pay-per-click)Buying traffic by paying only when someone clicks, with search advertising as the archetype: bidding on the words people type when they want something.Programmatic advertisingBuying digital ad space through automated auctions in real time, impression by impression, rather than by negotiated insertion orders.Prompt engineeringWriting instructions that get a model to produce what you actually want: role, context, examples, constraints, output format.
R
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation)Retrieval-augmented generation: the model looks up relevant documents from a trusted source first and answers from what it found, instead of from memory alone.ReachThe percentage of a target audience exposed to a campaign at least once in a period.RebrandingChanging a brand's identity - name, visual system, positioning or all three.RetargetingShowing ads to people who already visited, browsed or abandoned - re-entering the conversation their behaviour started.Right-brained advertisingAdvertising that engages broad, contextual, human attention - character, story, place, humour, music - rather than narrow feature-and-claim messaging.ROASReturn on ad spend: revenue attributed to a campaign divided by its cost, as reported by an attribution system.
S
Sales activationShort-term marketing that converts existing demand into sales now: tightly targeted, rational, measurable within weeks, and decaying just as fast.SEO (search engine optimisation)Search engine optimisation: making a site rank in organic search by matching what people look for, earning authority, and staying technically crawlable.Share of ModelHow often and how favourably a brand appears in AI assistants' answers - the LLM-era sibling of share of voice.Share of searchA brand's share of branded search volume within its category.Share of voice (SOV)A brand's share of the category's advertising presence, usually measured as its percentage of total category ad spend.Single-minded propositionThe one thing the ad must communicate, chosen at the cost of everything else the client also wanted to say.Social listeningSystematically monitoring public conversations - social posts, reviews, forums - for mentions of the brand, competitors and category.Social proofEvidence that other people already chose you, used as persuasion: reviews, ratings, customer counts, familiar logos, creator endorsements.Sonic brandingA brand's owned audio assets - sonic logo, jingle, voice, music style - built for the growing share of media consumed by ear or with eyes elsewhere.Subliminal advertisingMessages presented below conscious perception to influence behaviour - famously 'proven' by James Vicary's 1957 cinema experiment, which he later admitted was fabricated.Synthetic researchUsing AI-simulated respondents or personas in place of, or alongside, human research panels - synthetic audiences answer surveys, react to concepts, stress-test messaging.System 1 and System 2 thinkingKahneman's two modes of decision-making: System 1 is fast, automatic and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberate and rational.
T
Target audienceThe group a campaign is built and bought to reach, defined by category behaviour, need, demographics or context.The messy middleGoogle's model of how people actually decide between trigger and purchase: looping between exploration and evaluation, steered by heuristics like social proof, scarcity and authority, rather than descending a tidy funnel.Tone of voiceThe consistent verbal character of a brand - vocabulary, rhythm, attitude, what it jokes about and what it never says.Topical authoritySustained, interlinked coverage of one subject deep enough that search engines treat the site as an authority on it - many connected pieces beating scattered one-offs.
U
V
Value propositionThe clear statement of what the customer gets, from whom, and why it beats the alternatives - the promise that answers 'why buy this, from you'.Viral marketingContent engineered to be spread by its audience, so distribution multiplies beyond the paid seed.Visual identityThe system of visual elements a brand owns - logo, colour, typography, layout, photography style - designed to make it recognisable across every touchpoint.