Marketing is full of terms that sound familiar, but which lack agreed definitions.
The great JP Castlin wrote about this a few years ago (well worth a read just for the Milton Jones reference): unlike in disciplines like law, where every word is codified and tested, or accountancy, with its Agreed Accounting Principles, marketing language is often vague and inconsistent.
At best, this creates confusion internally, and opens the door for misinterpretation and wasted effort. (While at worst, it creates hiding places, and enables charlatans).
I believe that precision in marketing language matters. Clear, shared definitions help us communicate better, make decisions faster, and measure success accurately. By defining our terminology, we create alignment and clarity – essential for effective marketing, and for unified marketing and sales teams.
So, here’s the definitions I’ve used across my marketing teams over the past few years. (Better definitions may well exist… which is kind of the point. But this is what I’ve been using).
| Term | Definition |
| Account Based Marketing – ABM | A highly focused growth strategy that aligns marketing and sales to target a defined set of high-value accounts with personalised campaigns and outreach. ABM treats individual accounts as markets in their own right, aiming to drive deeper engagement and higher conversion. |
| Aided Recall | A measure of brand awareness where respondents recognise a brand when prompted with a list or cue. It indicates familiarity but relies on external prompts. |
| Aircover | Marketing activity designed to create awareness and mental availability among an audience, supporting targeted sales efforts by ensuring the brand is visible and remembered. |
| BOFU – bottom of funnel | The decision stage of a buyer journey, where prospects are ready to buy. Marketing activity here will likely focus on conversion tactics to help nudge buyers towards a close. Side note: Opinions on the value of funnels vary, as this excellent blog by Tom Roach details. But I still find reference to TOFU and BOFU to be useful shorthand. |
| Brand Associations | The mental connections consumers make with a brand, including attributes, benefits, and emotions that shape perception. |
| Brand Awareness | The extent to which consumers recognise and recall a brand, both aided and unaided. |
| Brand Building | Long-term marketing focused on creating mental availability and emotional connection with buyers. It aims to strengthen brand equity and preference through consistent messaging, storytelling, and broad-reach campaigns. |
| Brand Equity | The accumulated value of a brand built through awareness, associations, and loyalty. It reflects the brand’s ability to generate preference and premium pricing. |
| Brand Purpose | The brand’s reason for existing beyond profit, often tied to societal or emotional value. ‘Purpose’ became popular within marketing discourse in the later 2010s, but has been increasingly questioned in the 2020s. |
| Brand Salience | The likelihood of a brand being noticed or thought of in buying situations. High salience means the brand is mentally available when a category need arises. |
| Brand Tracking | The ongoing measurement of key brand health metrics such as awareness, salience, consideration, and preference over time. It helps monitor the impact of marketing activities, diagnose issues, and guide strategic decisions to maintain or grow brand strength. |
| Buyability | The degree to which a brand feels like the obvious, low-risk choice at the point of decision. A relatively new term within B2B marketing, it reflects the cumulative impact of factors such as brand strength, trust, emotional connection, and availability that make buying groups feel ready and confident to choose it. |
| Buyer Archetype | A strategic grouping of different buyer segments based on their shared core motivation or ‘buying mindset.’ It answers why they buy, transcending their job title or industry. |
| Buyer Journey | The path a prospect follows from initial awareness of a need or problem through consideration and evaluation to final purchase and post-purchase engagement. It maps the stages and touchpoints that influence buying decisions. Various journey models exist, but I love the simplicity of Forrester’s model, which breaks the journey into three stages: Discover, Evaluate, and Commit. |
| Buying Group | A set of individuals within an organisation who collectively influence or make a purchase decision. It typically includes multiple roles such as decision-makers, influencers, and end-users, each with distinct priorities and concerns. |
| CAGR – Compound Annual Growth Rate | The average annual rate at which a market or investment grows over a specified period of more than one year, assuming profits are reinvested. |
| Category | A grouping of products/services that solve a similar problem and compete for the same occasion (e.g., “cloud data warehouses”). A product category provides the mental and shelf “box” buyers file brands into. |
| Category Entry Point – CEP | The specific triggers, situations, or needs that cause a buyer to enter the market for a solution. It’s the ‘why’ or ‘why now?’ moment that initiates the buying journey. |
| Consideration Set | The shortlist of brands a buyer actively evaluates during the decision-making process. It represents the subset of options that make it past initial awareness and into serious comparison before purchase. |
| Day One Shortlist | A list of brands or vendors that a buyer already has in mind from the start of the procurement process, often without any active research. This list is the result of a buyer’s mental availability, where a brand is the first to come to mind when a need arises, before the formal buying journey even begins. |
| Differentiation | The process of creating meaningful differences in what a brand offers compared to competitors. It focuses on unique benefits, features, or positioning that make a brand more relevant and valuable to target customers. |
| Distinctive Brand Assets – DBAs | The unique visual and verbal cues that make a brand recognisable (e.g., colours, logos, taglines). |
| Distinctiveness | The use of unique, consistent brand assets (such as logos, colours, fonts, and symbols) that make a brand easily recognisable and memorable. |
| Effectiveness | The degree to which marketing activities achieve their intended objectives, and create incremental, sustainable business value. It answers the question: Did we do the right things to deliver the desired outcome? For example, increasing brand awareness or driving market share growth. |
| Efficiency | The measure of how economically resources (time, budget, effort) have been used to achieve results. It answers the question: Did we do things in the right way with minimal waste? For example, achieving a high ROI or low cost per acquisition. |
| Engagement | The degree to which a prospect interacts with your brand across channels and content. It reflects interest and involvement, measured through actions like clicks, downloads, shares, and conversations. |
| Excess Share of Voice – ESOV | The difference between a brand’s share of voice and its share of market. A positive ESOV (spending above current market share) is often linked to future growth, while a negative ESOV can signal decline. |
| Go-to-market / go-to-market strategy | The system and integrated set of choices and capabilities that determine how an organisation turns demand into revenue. It usually includes strategy (inc targeting and positioning), execution (inc product architecture and offer, messaging and demand gen, how demand is converted into sales) and measurement (how performance is tracked and decisions are made), and can therefore encompass marketing, sales and service activity. |
| Ideal Customer Profile – ICP | A detailed description of the type of organisation most likely to derive value from your solution and deliver high lifetime value. It typically includes firmographics, behaviours, and buying triggers that define your best-fit accounts. |
| Intent | A signal or indicator that a prospect is actively researching or considering a solution. It reflects the likelihood of purchase based on observed behaviours such as content consumption, search activity, or engagement with relevant topics. |
| Market Orientation | A business philosophy that prioritises understanding and responding to customer needs, competitor actions, and market dynamics. It drives decisions based on external insights rather than internal preferences, ensuring the organisation stays relevant and competitive. |
| Marketing Objectives | Specific, measurable goals that marketing aims to achieve, often linked to awareness, penetration, or share. |
| Marketing Qualified Lead – MQL | A prospect who has engaged with marketing activities and shown enough interest or fit to be considered ready for further nurturing by sales. MQLs meet predefined criteria such as content downloads, or event attendance, or demographic alignment. |
| Marketing Strategy | The overarching plan that guides how a brand will achieve its objectives in the market. It answers three fundamental questions: Who are we targeting? How are we positioning? What is our objective? |
| Mental Availability | The likelihood that a brand comes to mind in buying situations. It reflects how easily and often buyers think of your brand when a relevant need or trigger occurs. |
| MOFU – middle of funnel | The consideration stage where prospects are evaluating options and seeking solutions. Marketing efforts aim to build preference and trust through deeper content and proof points. |
| Nurture | A structured approach to building relationships with prospects over time through relevant, timely content and interactions. It aims to educate, build trust, and guide buyers toward purchase readiness. |
| Orchestration | The coordinated execution of marketing activities across channels and touchpoints to deliver a seamless, personalised buyer experience. |
| Penetration | The proportion of category buyers who purchase your brand within a given time frame. |
| Performance Marketing (aka ‘Activation’) | Marketing activities designed to drive immediate, measurable actions such as clicks, sign-ups, or purchases. |
| Persona | A detailed, semi-fictional profile that layers demographics, firmographics, pains, preferences and objections onto an archetype. |
| Physical Availability | The ease with which buyers can purchase your brand across channels and locations. |
| Positioning | The deliberate act of defining how a brand intends to be perceived in the minds of its target customers, relative to competitors. |
| Price Elasticity | The sensitivity of demand to changes in price, critical for pricing strategy. |
| Prospecting | The process of identifying and initiating contact with potential customers or accounts to generate new business opportunities. |
| Revenue Operations (RevOps) | An operating model that aligns people, processes, data, and technology across the revenue lifecycle to improve predictability and efficiency of growth. It’s essentially the systemisation of firm’s go-to-market strategy, and usually involves aligning sales, marketing, and customer success activities and operations. |
| Sales Enablement | The process of equipping sales teams with the tools, content, and insights they need to engage buyers effectively and close deals. |
| Sales Qualified Lead – SQL / Sales Accepted Lead – SAL | An MQL that has been vetted and accepted by the sales team as a genuine opportunity. SQLs typically demonstrate clear buying intent and meet stricter qualification criteria, making them ready for direct sales engagement. |
| Segment | A small subgroup within a larger market. A segment may be defined through the process of segmentation, and chosen through the process of targeting. |
| Segmentation | The process of dividing a broad market into smaller, homogeneous groups based on shared traits (firmographics, behaviour, needs). |
| Segmentation Targeting Positioning – STP | The so-called ‘Holy Trinity of Marketing’ – the classic strategic framework, and three-step process for defining who to serve and how to differentiate. |
| Share of Market – SOM | The percentage of total category sales captured by a brand. |
| Share of Voice – SOV | A measure of a brand’s presence in the market compared to competitors, typically expressed as a percentage of total advertising or media activity within a category. |
| Social Proof | The psychological phenomenon where people copy the actions of others to determine their own behaviour, especially in uncertain situations. This concept is widely used in marketing to build trust through examples like reviews, case studies, testimonials, and endorsements. |
| TAL – Target Account List | A curated list of high-priority accounts selected for focused marketing and sales efforts. |
| TAM – Total Addressable Market | The total potential revenue available for a specific service or product within a defined market. |
| Targeting | The practice of selecting specific audience segments or group of accounts to focus marketing and sales efforts on, based on their likelihood to convert and deliver value. |
| The 4 Ps | A foundational marketing framework representing the key elements of the marketing mix: Product – What you offer, including features, design, and quality. Price – How much you charge and the pricing strategy used. Place – Where and how the product is distributed and made available. Promotion – The communication activities that create awareness and drive demand. |
| The 95:5 rule | A principle stating that at any given time, only about 5% of buyers are actively in-market for a solution, while 95% are out-of-market. The exact number can be calculated for each category, and it will vary. But we quote ‘95:5’ to serve as a ‘mental model’, and a reminder that focussing only on lower funnel activity may limit returns. |
| The Messy Middle | A term popularised by a Google study on purchase behaviour, ‘The Messy Middle’ describes the complex, non-linear stage between initial awareness and purchase decision, where buyers loop between more expansive exploration activities, and more reductive evaluation activities. |
| Thought Leadership | The practice of creating and sharing authoritative, forward-thinking content that positions a brand or individual as an expert in their field. It aims to build trust, influence perceptions, and shape industry conversations by offering valuable insights, rather than overt product promotion. |
| TOFU – top of funnel | The earliest stage of the buyer journey where prospects become aware of a problem or opportunity. |
| Top of Mind | The brand that first comes to a buyer’s mind when thinking about a category or need. It reflects the highest level of mental availability and is a strong predictor of purchase likelihood. |
| Unaided Recall | A measure of brand awareness where respondents spontaneously name a brand without any prompts. It reflects very strong mental availability and top-of-mind presence. |
| Voice of Customer – VOC | A structured approach to capturing and analysing customer feedback, opinions, and expectations. VOC provides insights into needs and pain points, helping shape products, services, and messaging to align with customer priorities. |
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