My Favorite Marketing Definitions

by Gary Slack

Almost all of us collect things—often offbeat things.

I know a man who collects Toby jugs, another who collects old-time lunch boxes and a husband-wife couple whose stately home is a museum to soaps and soap marketing over the last century.

For my part, I collect marketing definitions. Fortunately, this “hobby” does not require a basement or a room or even a drawer … just a megabyte or two on my iPad^® Pro.

Here are my nine favorites of some 20 or so I’ve collected over the years.

1.) “Marketing is what you do when you can’t go see somebody.”

I always like to start with this one—the simplest and the oldest (circa the 1940s or 1950s, I believe), uttered or written by Fairfax Cone, one of the founders of Foote Cone & Belding, now FCB.

Cone was a protégé of the ad agency giant