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SOURCES
Definitions of Marketing
Commonly Asked Marketing Questions
Episode 005: Brought To You By The 4 P’s… Or Is It The 4 C’s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSS7p770RQQ&list=PL6322ocaFHYhudNElI5J7ybTVcHJJZsHh&index=5&t=4s
https://www.toptal.com/creator/post/what-happens-when-you-go-viral
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
So today’s episode is #175, and while that’s not a particularly special number in and of itself, it feels like as good a point as any to do something a little different.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague who confessed that even though she works in marketing, she has a pretty weak understanding of the sorts of stuff we teach in business school about marketing, like what the 4 P’s are. I’ve had other marketers tell me they’re not sure what the functional definition of marketing is or what it means when we talk about things like sales channels or supply chains.
And I get it, because I worked in marketing and PR long before I ever took my first marketing class, and so I never assume that anyone who works in marketing actually knows these things.
I also don’t assume that people who’ve taken a marketing class necessarily know these things, because a lot of people who do pick marketing as their focus have plenty of other interests as well that cause them to forget what they learned in the classroom.
So, you know what? We’re going to take some time today answering those fundamental marketing questions, and to guide us, I’m going to pull some questions – but give my own answers! – from a helpful article I found on the American Marketing Association’s website called “Commonly Asked Marketing Questions.”
It’s linked in the show notes if you’re interested.
So, here we go! Let’s tackle some of these great marketing questions.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So first up on our questions is actually not in the article I just mentioned, but it’s found elsewhere on the American Marketing Association’s website, and it’s a very simple one.
What is marketing?
Well, it’s not just sales and advertising, I’ll tell you that!
The AMA currently has a definition that reads like this:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
I say it’s the current definition because they’ve revised it several times over the decades. The older definitions used to focus on the flow of goods and services or the execution of a marketing plan or the notion of building customer relationships. But the current definition has to incorporate a whole lot of different things because marketing is… well, it’s complicated.
So let me offer an analogy, if I may.
I want you to imagine for a moment that we’re out in a grassy field on a nice day looking up in the sky on a sunny day and we see these white, fluffy things floating above us that we all can recognize from where we’re standing are something any child could identify – clouds.
Now, I want you to imagine that we strap on jetpacks and take off and decide we’re going to head into one of these clouds and see what they’re like on the inside.
What’s going to happen is things are going to get dark. They’re going to get wet. We’re going to have trouble seeing each other and we’re also not going to have a very good sense of where the boundaries are.
What the cloud’s shaped like, how big it is, how fast it’s moving and in what direction it’s going – it’s all going to be really hard for us to see from the inside.
But when we head out and finally get back down on the ground and look at the cloud again, we’re going to be able to understand all of those things very easily.
And more importantly, our confusion about what we were experiencing on the inside is going to vanish because we’re once again going to be able to look at this white, fluffy thing and just say, “that’s a cloud.”
Or, perhaps I should say, “that’s marketing.” We know what it looks like from far away, but when we see it up close, it’s a big, confusing mess.
So, advertising tends to be associated with marketing. And it’s an important part of marketing! But it’s just one tool in a surprisingly large toolbox.
Sales is also associated with marketing, but sales and marketing aren’t actually the same thing! Marketing helps sales and hopefully makes them easier, but sales is about selling. Marketing is about more than that.
We talk a lot about brands in marketing, and brands are a tremendously important concept! But brands aren’t marketing, even if branding is one of the most fundamental concepts in marketing because a brand is a very compact way of describing something’s purpose, values, function, price category and so much more.
A brand is what we call a “heuristic,” or mental shortcut, and those are very useful to marketers.
You’ve probably also heard terms like “content marketing” or “digital marketing” or “event marketing” or “peer to peer marketing” or “viral marketing” or “influencer marketing” and perhaps even work in one of those fields, whether or not you actually ever took a marketing class.
All of those concepts are flavors of marketing! But they’re also each just a small part of what marketing actually is.
And then there’s the jargon. We use terms all the time like B2B, B2C, the 4 P’s, CPM, A/B Testing, ap spend, target market, marketing campaign, brand positioning and so much more.
A surprising number of terms we use in marketing actually come from military language, which tells you a lot about how this whole field evolved!
All of this – and much more – is marketing, because functionally, marketing is about having something of value to offer someone else and then finding a way to communicate that value to them so that they’ll become aware and maybe even interested.
That’s it. That’s what marketing actually is.
So, next question. What are the 4 P’s?
They’re a traditional framework for defining marketing tactics. They are price, promotion, product and place, which is also known as distribution.
They gradually evolved over time from longer lists of tactics as marketing itself evolved.
They’re also sort of outdated in the 21st century because today’s products and services are a little bit more complicated than that.
So as it happens, I already did an episode all about the 4 P’s and the many, many refinements to the framework that have been floated since.
It was 170 episodes ago – Episode #5!
I felt like I was on an episode of Sesame Street with all those letters and numbers. You can check the show notes to find it.
What’s the difference between a marketing campaign and an advertising campaign?
Scope. A marketing campaign usually involves a lot more than just advertising and tends to consider things like our pricing strategy, our distribution strategy, our brand positioning, our target market and so forth.
An advertising campaign tends to be constructed in response to a specific marketing objective and usually is trying to advance one specific goal, like increasing sales or building awareness.
Let’s use our war analogy here.
The marketing campaign is basically our plan for the entire war, while the advertising campaign is more like our plan for how we’re going to win a specific part of the war, perhaps with bombings or troop deployments or just rolling up on the front lines and blasting annoying music out of the boom boxes strapped to our tanks until our enemies have had enough.
Or, if we want to go a more peaceful route, the marketing campaign is how we plan to protest military action and the advertising campaign is distributing anti-war posters showing flower children gently sliding daisies into gun barrels that are being pointed at them.
What’s the difference between a marketing strategy and marketing tactics?
Detail. A marketing strategy is generally written down in some sort of document, though these days, that might be a PowerPoint deck.
One of the most common frameworks for a marketing strategy is to articulate your opportunity, your goals, your plan to achieving those goals and your spend.
I teach a pretty solid framework called G-STIC – Goals, Strategy, Implementation, Tactics and Controls – in my graduate courses, and it involves creating a comprehensive marketing strategy in the form of a written plan.
Marketing tactics are the tools we plan to use to achieve that strategy. So, for example, maybe we decide to refresh our brand for better visibility, or maybe we launch an influencer campaign to build awareness, or maybe we spend $1 million on a digital ad campaign to boost awareness of our products or services.
The key is that the tactics are used to help us fulfill our strategy.
How can we make something “go viral”?
So, I may not be the best person to ask since I’ve never actually created something that’s gone viral on the internet.
But I have studied this, and generally, it’s some combination of having a novel idea that’s interesting, emotionally engaging or just flat out entertaining, then finding an audience that will enjoy it, and then having the right luck and timing and goodwill to see that audience start sharing it like crazy.
A lot of brands have tried to go viral and they’ve often failed.
And a lot of influencers who’ve built their careers on going viral once have tried and tried to do it again and have never been able to get that combination right again.
One of the most famous cases is the South Korean singer Psy, who went mega-viral with his song, music video and dance for his single, “Gangnam Style.”
Psy is actually a big deal in South Korea and has tons of hit songs there, but he’s never been able to achieve that level of viral, worldwide success again despite trying really hard to do so.
But how you define “going viral” is also important. If your goal is worldwide superstardom, good luck.
But if your goal is to stoke social media to get lifts on some of your content, there are tried and true ways of doing that, and they usually include some combination of timing, luck and understanding how particular algorithms promote things.
Increasingly, the biggest shortcut to virality is paid sponsorship for greater visibility, but just remember that you don’t decide what goes viral.
The audience does.
So the best way to get there is to produce a lot of content and let them decide what they want to elevate.
Next question.
How do I create a social media marketing strategy?
So, speaking of social media, let’s talk about this very modern and important tool for a moment, because the rules are still being written about what does and doesn’t work on social media, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the social media landscape is ever-changing.
First of all, before you do anything, come up with a detailed plan about what you want your social media presence to look like.
Are you going to have your brand speak for itself, or are you going to have brand ambassadors speak for your brand?
Are you going to focus on your product or service, or your customers, or your promotions?
Are you trying to build hype for something that isn’t available yet, or are you trying to build awareness of something that does exist?
Are you trying to cultivate a new brand image to reignite interest, or are you trying to establish one because nobody knows anything about you?
These are important considerations because if you’re a brand no one’s ever heard of, your effectiveness on social media will be limited, and if you’re a brand that people are bored of hearing from, you’re going to have to do something really interesting to stand out.
The next thing to consider is where your brand belongs. Most brands, I’m sorry to say, are not well-suited to being on high-engagement platforms like X, Reddit, Threads or BlueSky because those platforms demand pretty instant gratification and you have to have at least one person – and more likely, a team – dedicated to that role.
Don’t follow the lead of brands who jump on those platforms and make a lot of noise without a strategy and, ideally, a social media brand manager who’s going to be devoted to building engagement there.
And definitely don’t outsource that role to AI unless you want to risk being called inauthentic.
TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are also probably not right for you to do on your own because they require a constant supply of content for you to be effective.
Unless you have the time and resources to focus on those, I would partner with an agency if that type of content is central to your strategy.
A better place for your brand is probably going to be a more traditional social network like Facebook, Instagram or even LinkedIn.
They’re high-visibility, your content has a longer life and they’re built for brands to offer a point of connection without having to provide a lot of regular content or updates. Facebook and Instagram are better for reaching consumers, and LinkedIn is better for reaching B2B contacts.
I would start with one of those.
But again, what’s the purpose of being on social media? You need to figure that out as well, because social media is not a one-way street. It invites conversation and commentary. You have to give in order to get.
So if your purpose is to interact with customers or answer questions, make sure you’ve got someone on top of that checking in on it every day.
And if your purpose is to treat it like a vanity project where you’re only interested in telling everyone how awesome you are and not interacting with others, ask yourself if a social media strategy is actually right for you, because you might want to instead consider a content strategy or a mailer strategy or start a podcast where it’s more appropriate to do that.
Yes, believe it or not, you can be a total blowhard and still be successful as a marketer. You just need to find the right forum.
OK, we’ve covered a lot of ground. I hope this was helpful to you! And if you have other marketing questions I didn’t answer, send them to us and we’ll cover them in a future episode!
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