Who Stole the “Marketing” Term? An Open Investigation.
The Story That Sparked the Question I recently met a young man, about 22 years old, straight out of
The Story That Sparked the Question
I recently met a young man, about 22 years old, straight out of university, excited and ambitious. You know the type: the world hasn’t punched him in the gut yet, so everything is possible. Through our conversation, I asked him, “What do you do?” Without hesitation, he replied: “Marketing.” I thought about it for a second. I mean, I am old school and understand things differently than young people, so I asked him back: “What is marketing?” He looked me dead in the eye and said: “I do social media.”
Now, I could have turned this into a philosophical debate, maybe even a masterclass right there on the spot, but instead I smiled politely, nodded, and said: “Okay.” In my head though, it was not okay. Not even close.
The way I see marketing, the way I was educated to perceive it, and the way I experienced marketing and marketing management is a completely different universe from what this young man described. Starting with my internship, when I was 3 years younger than that guy, yeah i was a nerd, all the way to becoming Marketing Director at LG International between 2008 and 2013, responsible for the Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi markets, things were radically different.
At Pepsi, we weren’t even allowed to attend marketing meetings as interns, let alone assist in them, or even fetch coffee for someone in the department, until we knew everything there was to know about the product. We had to live the brand inside and out. That meant sitting for hours watching production lines and factory workers doing the same thing again and again, study methodology, speed, try and find out errors in movement in the factory, to getting our hands dirty on distribution trips in 35-degree heat that felt closer to 40 inside the truck, sweating buckets while lugging 12-pack cartons into tiny grocery stores, following salesmen door-to-door. By the time we got back to the office, we looked like grilled chickens, crispy outside and soggy inside. And, I will never forget sitting in a supermarket stopwatching movement next to the refrigerators to assess and report human behavior, plus, and here’s the painful thing, reorganizing the bottles and cans at 3 degrees, finishing with a numb face and freezing hands.
At LG, it was even tougher. We got to play engineers. I reached a point where I could strip down a washing machine and put it back together; not because they wanted me to become a technician, but because every product launch required us to understand the “what”, the “how” and the “why” behind every detail. Teams from South Korea would fly in and train us on the intricacies of each model, and it was our job to extract what each market actually needed.
Here’s one very easy example: two washing machine models. Identical in shape, color, and function. The only difference? One had its wiring wrapped in plastic, the other in bronze. Retail prices: 600 dollars versus 1100 dollars. Same machine, different psychology. The indirect question to the customer was: do you want an appliance you’ll replace in four years, or one you’ll brag about to your grandchildren? Most newlyweds moving to a new house picked the cheaper one, of course, but that’s a conversation for another article.
I remember very well that my job was more about thinking than just managing campaigns. It was about being close to the CEO to shape policies, working hand-in-hand with finance on budgets, sitting with HR when recruiting sales and marketing staff, training and challenging the sales force, and driving strategy across departments. CMOs, in my view, are the closest thing to CEOs, because we learn to play with everyone. We are the ones orchestrating connections between functions. Social media management is a valuable tool, but it is one instrument in an entire orchestra. And believe me, an orchestra with just the triangle playing is not music. It’s noise. I even bet that an amateur content creator, just like the guy I met, working for a very small restaurant, doesn’t even know what the items on the menu are made of.
What Marketing Really Is
Let’s get one thing straight: marketing has never been about a single channel, a single campaign, or a single set of tools. Marketing is the discipline of orchestrating human attention, perception, and behavior in alignment with business objectives. It is as much psychology and anthropology as it is business.
A marketer worth their title knows that the process begins not with content creation but with immersion in markets, in consumer needs, in cultural codes. It is about designing the architecture of relevance. You study who your customer is, not just as a demographic but as a mind shaped by biases, aspirations, and fears. You analyze competitors not just to match their moves but to uncover the gaps in their thinking. You design pricing strategies that trigger perceived value, not just balance the spreadsheets.
Neuroscience has only deepened our understanding of why the promotional part most of us call marketing works. The brain does not process ads rationally. It is flooded by emotions, stories, and symbols before reason ever kicks in. Neuromarketing studies show us how visual cues, colors, and even the rhythm of a campaign tap into limbic responses that bypass conscious thought. A discount might look like arithmetic to finance, but to the brain it feels like dopamine.
So no, marketing is not “running a Facebook page.” It is managing a system of value creation where every lever, from product engineering to customer experience, is a touchpoint in the consumer’s mind. And the best marketers are less like social media managers and more like psychologists with spreadsheets, engineers of desire, and conductors of corporate symphonies.
In a simpler way, all I’m trying to say is that the term is very wide in its meaning. It starts with the ideation of a product, and does not not stop at sales.
How the Term Got Hijacked
Something went wrong between 1990 and now. Back then, marketing directors were strategists who sat next to CEOs, influencing not just advertising but company policy. They were the interpreters of culture. But with the rise of the internet and then the explosion of social media, the most visible tip of the marketing iceberg became the iceberg itself.
What happened? Technology collapsed barriers to entry. Anyone could publish, anyone could advertise, anyone could build an audience. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram reframed marketing into an accessible, surface-level set of tasks. Agencies began pitching “marketing packages” that consisted almost entirely of social media posting. Slowly, the term lost its depth.
It is not entirely the fault of the young professionals using the tools. The platforms themselves rewired the psychology of marketing. They made visibility itself the currency. Followers, likes, impressions: these metrics became confused with brand equity. And the market rewarded it, at least temporarily.
From a psychological point of view, this was inevitable. Human brains love what is measurable. Likes and shares create the dopamine hit of instant validation. In contrast, building long-term positioning strategies is invisible and slow. The human bias for immediacy tilted the industry away from substance.
In a sense, the marketing term was not only stolen but hollowed out. What was once the science of influencing markets became the art of gaming algorithms. And in the process, the word “marketing” shrank from strategy to posting.
The Psychology of Old School vs. New School
Old-school marketers are systems thinkers. Their psychology is rooted in patience, pattern recognition, and long-term planning. They derive satisfaction from market studies, competitor analysis, segmentation models, and consumer insights. They are comfortable with ambiguity because they know behavior is nonlinear. They are strategic because they have lived the pain of markets not responding as predicted.
New-school marketers, raised in the digital age, have a different psychological profile. They thrive on speed, iteration, and feedback loops. Their dopamine is tied to metrics dashboards, real-time analytics, and the adrenaline rush of “content going viral.” For them, learning is experiential and agile. They see success in terms of immediacy: a campaign worked if the numbers spiked this week.
Neuroscience explains this divide. Old-school marketing engages the prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for planning, decision-making, and delayed gratification. New-school marketing engages the reward systems, particularly the striatum and dopamine circuits that light up with likes and shares. One brain seeks mastery; the other seeks momentum.
The problem is not that one is right and the other wrong. Both mindsets are necessary. One brings stability and discipline, the other brings experimentation and adaptability. But when the second dominates, we end up with what we see now: marketing that is reactive rather than strategic, shallow rather than systemic.
How to Fix the Damage
The damage can be repaired, but only if we take a deliberate, multi-layered approach.
Education: Universities need to rethink their marketing programs. Teaching “digital marketing” without teaching market psychology, neuromarketing, pricing theory, or strategic planning is malpractice. Students must understand that a social media post is one tactical expression of a much larger, strategic discipline. They should graduate knowing not just how to run ads but how to think like market architects… Or, or, or, just please change the name, maybe to what it is exactly: digital-advertising and promotions.
Organizational Clarity: Companies must stop conflating execution with strategy. Social media managers are valuable, but they are specialists. Marketers should be multidisciplinary leaders who work across R&D, finance, operations, and sales. CMOs need their rightful seat at the executive table, where they can guide not just campaigns but corporate evolution.
Mentorship and Cross-Generational Bridges: Old-school marketers must mentor new-school practitioners. The young generation has agility, creativity, and platform fluency. The older generation has strategy, patience, and systems thinking. Put them together and you get balance. Without it, you get the blind leading the short-sighted.
Psychological Reset: We must retrain brains to value long-term gains over instant gratification. This is not easy. But by reframing metrics, setting milestones beyond likes, and rewarding patience in organizations, we can gradually shift the reward system back to depth over surface.
Ultimately, the fix is cultural. It requires reminding ourselves that marketing is not a stunt for attention but a system for creating and sustaining value. Reclaiming the word is less about definitions and more about discipline.
Taking Marketing Back
Marketing has always been the heartbeat of business, the discipline that translates corporate goals into human behavior. Somewhere along the way, the word itself was stolen, reduced from strategy and insight into “posting.” But the discipline is alive and powerful if we defend it.
We must insist that marketing is not a channel but a compass, not a campaign but a culture. Social media is a tool, not the toolbox. A true marketer is not someone who posts; it is someone who listens, studies, strategizes, and shapes. The orchestra deserves its conductor back.
Let’s Recap
Marketing was never just about ads or posts. It is the science of understanding human needs and behaviors and translating them into value for businesses and society. Over the past three decades, technology and social media platforms hollowed out the word, making “marketing” synonymous with execution rather than strategy. Psychologically, this split reflects the divide between old-school marketers who seek mastery and long-term impact and new-school practitioners who thrive on immediacy and dopamine-driven metrics. To fix this, we need deeper education, clearer organizational roles, stronger mentorship, and a cultural reset that restores marketing to its rightful place: not as noise but as the orchestrator of connection.
