Brand marketing. Growth marketing. Performance marketing. Product marketing. Retention marketing. Revenue marketing. Lifecycle marketing. Demand generation marketing. Customer-centric marketing. Data-driven marketing. Solutions marketing. Account-based marketing. Influencer marketing.
There are more.
There are always more.
And I’m sure each of these has its dedicated thought leaders, advocates, and conference tracks explaining, at length, why this particular flavor of marketing is fundamentally different from all the others and requires a specific set of skills.
I don’t know why we’re creating these discrete marketing religions — each with its own doctrine, its own vocabulary, and its own implicit argument that theirs is the real savior of the discipline; we can’t even align on a definition of marketing.
I could not find a single authoritative, agreed-upon definition for these marketing variations. I checked academic sources, large-language models, industry publications. What I got back was a collection of vague, overlapping descriptions each claiming to be distinct while describing more or less the same things.
Of course, repackaging an existing, established thing with a new name — and then acting as though we’ve created something new — is so marketing. It feels more like a desperate attempt at relevance, not a mature discipline carefully delineating sub-field nuance.
The consequences of this are real. Marketing already has a credibility problem, especially among the C-suite. Executives already think we're vague, hard to measure, and too precious about our own craft. Fragmenting the discipline into an ever-expanding taxonomy of sub-specialties — each claiming unique importance — does not help. This splintering of marketing into a dozen sub-disciplines:
Creates silos: The growth marketer and the brand marketer aren't talking to each other because they think they're doing different things.
Obscures accountability: You can’t isolate variables (and make adjustments accordingly) with ambiguous, overlapping labels. It just creates more places for blame to hide.
Undermines credibility: Finance, operations, and legal don't have seventeen sub-disciplines; when they see that marketing does, it's hard to make the case that it's a serious, accountable discipline.
A smorgasbord (orgasbord, orgasbord) of labels make the org chart more complicated and the job responsibilities less clear. The solution is clarity about what marketing actually is: the discipline responsible for building awareness among target audiences and driving qualified demand for a company's offerings.
Everything else is just adjective-driven semantics.
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