Glossary

Framework glossary

87 basic terms that the rest of the framework library builds on, explained in plain words, each with the source it comes from. Where a term has a full guide, the row links to it.

Strategy and competition

6 terms

Term	What it means	Source
SWOT analysis	A four-box list of a company's internal strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats, used to see where to play before choosing a plan. Its origin is disputed: Albert Humphrey is often credited, but researchers trace it to Harvard in the 1960s.	Puyt, Lie, Wilderom, The origins of SWOT analysis, Long Range Planning, 2023
PEST / PESTLE analysis	A checklist of outside forces that can change a market: political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental. It grew from Francis Aguilar's 1967 work on scanning the business environment.	CIPD, PESTLE analysis factsheet
Mission, vision, values	Three short statements a company writes about itself: why it exists (mission), what it wants to become (vision) and how people are expected to behave on the way (values).	Collins and Porras, Building Your Company's Vision, Harvard Business Review, 1996
Value proposition	A clear statement of the benefit a customer gets, and why it beats the alternatives, written from the customer's side. Michael Lanning and Edward Michaels introduced the term in a 1988 McKinsey paper.	Anderson, Narus, van Rossum, Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets, Harvard Business Review, 2006
Business Model Canvas	A one-page template with nine blocks (customers, value proposition, channels, relationships, revenue, resources, activities, partners, costs) that shows how a business makes money. Alexander Osterwalder developed it.	Strategyzer, The Business Model Canvas
Lean Canvas	Ash Maurya's startup version of the Business Model Canvas. It swaps some blocks for problem, solution, key metrics and unfair advantage, so a founder can write down the riskiest assumptions on one page.	Ash Maurya, Why Lean Canvas versus Business Model Canvas

Marketing strategy and positioning

6 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Marketing mix (4P)	The four levers a company sets when it brings something to market: product, price, place (where and how it is sold) and promotion. Jerome McCarthy grouped them this way in 1960.	E. Jerome McCarthy, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, 1960 (Internet Archive)
7P of services marketing	The 4P plus three levers that matter when the product is a service: people, process and physical evidence (what the customer can see, such as the clinic or the website). Booms and Bitner proposed them in 1981.	Rafiq and Ahmed, Using the 7Ps as a generic marketing mix, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 1995
4C model	Robert Lauterborn's 1990 rewrite of the 4P from the buyer's side: customer needs instead of product, cost to the customer instead of price, convenience instead of place, and communication instead of promotion.	Schultz, Tannenbaum, Lauterborn, Integrated Marketing Communications, 1993 (Internet Archive)
Target audience	The specific group of people a product or message is meant for, described by who they are, what they need and where they can be reached. Everyone outside it is a deliberate choice not to aim at.	American Marketing Association, Definitions of marketing
USP (unique selling proposition)	One specific benefit that a competitor does not or cannot offer, strong enough to make someone buy. Rosser Reeves set out the idea in his 1961 book Reality in Advertising.	Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising, 1961 (Internet Archive)
Marketing strategy Full guide	The plan for which customers a company will serve, what it will offer them and why they should choose it, turned into choices about product, price, channels and messages over a set period.	American Marketing Association, Definitions of marketing

Brand and communications

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Brand identity Full guide	Everything a company deliberately controls about how it looks and sounds: name, logo, colours, type, voice and the promise behind them. It is what the company sends; brand image is what people take away.	Kevin Lane Keller, Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity, Journal of Marketing, 1993
Tone of voice	How a brand sounds in writing and speech: formal or casual, serious or funny, respectful or irreverent. It stays the same across channels so people recognise the company without seeing the logo.	Nielsen Norman Group, The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice
Brand awareness Full guide	How many people in the target market recognise a brand when they see it (recognition) or name it unprompted when they think of the category (recall).	Kevin Lane Keller, Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Managing Customer-Based Brand Equity, Journal of Marketing, 1993
Storytelling	Presenting a message as a story, with a person, a problem, a struggle and a result, because people remember and act on stories more readily than on lists of facts.	Robert McKee, Storytelling That Moves People, Harvard Business Review, 2003

Customer and market research

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Customer development	Steve Blank's method for startups: get out of the office and test with real customers whether the problem exists and whether they would pay, before building the full product.	Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Customer interview	A one-to-one conversation to learn how a customer works and what they have done, asked about past behaviour rather than opinions about a future product, so the answers are harder to fake.	Rob Fitzpatrick, The Mom Test
Survey design	Writing and ordering survey questions so the answers mean what you think they mean: neutral wording, one idea per question, answer options that do not overlap, and a sample that matches the audience.	Pew Research Center, Writing survey questions
Desk research Full guide	Research done from data that already exists, such as industry reports, public statistics, competitors' websites and the company's own records, before paying for new interviews or surveys.	Market Research Society, What is market research?

Growth and experimentation

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Growth marketing Full guide	Marketing run as a loop of small, measured experiments across the whole customer path, from first visit to repeat purchase, with budget moving to whatever the numbers show works.	Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, Hacking Growth, 2017
Growth hacking	Sean Ellis's 2010 name for a role focused only on growth, using fast, cheap and often technical experiments instead of large campaigns. Today it is mostly used as another name for growth marketing.	Sean Ellis, Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup, 2010
Hypothesis Full guide	A testable statement of what you expect to happen and why, written before the test: "if we change X for audience Y, metric Z will move by this much, because of this reason."	Britannica, Scientific hypothesis
A/B test	An experiment that shows two versions of a page, ad or email to randomly split groups at the same time and compares one metric, so the difference can be put down to the change and not to chance.	Amy Gallo, A Refresher on A/B Testing, Harvard Business Review, 2017

Acquisition and performance

6 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Traffic channels	The groups analytics tools use to say where visitors came from: organic search, paid search, social, email, referral, direct and others. Each channel has its own cost and quality.	Google Analytics Help, Default channel group
Contextual advertising	Ads shown because of what a person is searching for or reading at that moment, such as search ads matched to keywords, rather than because of who the person is.	Google Ads Help, About keyword matching options
Targeted advertising	Ads shown to people chosen by their characteristics or behaviour (age, location, interests, past visits) on social networks and ad platforms. Health and finance ads face extra limits on this.	Google Ads Help, About audience segments
Lead Full guide	A potential customer who has left contact details or otherwise shown interest, for example by filling in a form or calling. A lead is not yet a sale and not yet qualified.	Salesforce, What is a sales lead?
Lead generation Full guide	All the work that turns strangers into leads: ads, content, events, referrals and offers that give people a reason to share their contact details.	Salesforce, What is lead generation?
Influencer marketing	Paying or giving products to people with an audience so they recommend a brand. In the US and many other markets the paid relationship has to be clearly disclosed in the post.	Federal Trade Commission, Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers

Content, SEO and GEO

5 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Content marketing	Publishing useful articles, videos, guides and tools that the target audience wants anyway, to attract and keep customers without paying for every visit. Joe Pulizzi popularised the term in the early 2000s.	Content Marketing Institute, What is content marketing?
SEO	Search engine optimisation: making a site easy for search engines to crawl and understand, and making its pages the most useful answer to what people search for, so it appears in unpaid results.	Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide
Search intent	What a person wants when they type a query: to learn something, to do or buy something, to reach a specific site, or to find a place nearby. A page ranks when it matches that intent.	Google, Search Quality Rater Guidelines (user intent section)
Semantic core	A term used mostly in Russian-speaking SEO: the full list of search queries a site should rank for, grouped by topic and mapped to pages. In English it is usually called a keyword map.	Yandex Wordstat Help, Keyword statistics
Content plan	A schedule of what will be published, where, when and by whom, tied to the audience's questions and the company's goals, so content is produced on purpose rather than when someone has time.	Content Marketing Institute, Editorial calendar tools and templates

Funnels, CRO and CX

5 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Sales funnel Full guide	The steps a person goes through from first hearing of a product to paying for it, drawn as a funnel because fewer people remain at each step. The idea goes back to the AIDA model of the early 1900s.	Google Analytics Help, Funnel exploration
Conversion rate Full guide	The share of people who take a chosen action out of all who could: for example, 30 bookings from 1,000 visitors is a 3% conversion rate.	Google Ads Help, Conversion rate: Definition
Landing page Full guide	The page a person lands on after clicking an ad or link, built around one offer and one action, so it answers the promise that made them click.	Google Ads Help, About landing page experience
Call to action (CTA)	The prompt that tells a visitor what to do next, such as "Book a consultation" or "Download the template", usually a button. A clear CTA names the action and what the person gets.	Nielsen Norman Group, "Get Started" Stops Users
Customer experience (CX)Full guide	How a customer feels about every contact with a company, from the ad and the website to the call, the service and the invoice, taken together rather than one channel at a time.	Meyer and Schwager, Understanding Customer Experience, Harvard Business Review, 2007

Retention, CRM and lifecycle

5 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Customer retention Full guide	Keeping existing customers buying over time, measured as the share still active after a set period. Keeping a customer usually costs less than winning a new one.	Reichheld and Sasser, Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services, Harvard Business Review, 1990
Churn rate Full guide	The share of customers who stop buying or cancel in a period. If 1,000 subscribers start the month and 30 cancel, monthly churn is 3%.	Investopedia, Churn rate
Loyalty program	A scheme that rewards repeat customers with points, discounts or status. Research shows it works best when the reward supports the product's own value rather than trying to replace it.	Dowling and Uncles, Do Customer Loyalty Programs Really Work?, MIT Sloan Management Review, 1997
CRM	Customer relationship management: the system, and the habits around it, that record every lead, customer, contact and deal in one place so the team knows who said what and what happens next.	Salesforce, What is CRM?
Email marketing	Sending planned emails to people who agreed to receive them: newsletters, offers, reminders and follow-ups. Commercial email must identify the sender and include a working unsubscribe link.	Federal Trade Commission, CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business

Sales and B2B

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Sales pipeline Full guide	All open deals laid out by stage, from first contact to signed contract, with their value, so a team can see what is likely to close and where deals get stuck.	Salesforce, What is a sales pipeline?
Sales script Full guide	A written guide for sales calls: how to open, which questions to ask, how to present the offer and how to close. A good script is a checklist of questions, not a speech to read out.	Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling, Huthwaite International
Objection handling	Answering a buyer's doubts, such as price, timing or trust, by first asking what is behind the doubt and then giving facts that address it, rather than arguing.	Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling, Huthwaite International
Cold outreach	Contacting people who have not asked to hear from you, by email, phone or social message. Rules on consent and opt-out differ by country and channel, so the list and the message both need checking.	Information Commissioner's Office (UK), Electronic mail marketing

Pricing and monetization

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Pricing strategy Full guide	The logic a company uses to set prices: based on its costs, on competitors, or on the value the customer gets. Small price changes move profit more than most other levers.	Marn and Rosiello, Managing Price, Gaining Profit, Harvard Business Review, 1992
Cost-plus pricing	Setting the price by adding a fixed percentage on top of what the product costs to make or deliver. It is simple, but ignores what customers are willing to pay.	Investopedia, Cost-plus pricing
Markup vs margin Full guide	Markup is profit as a share of cost; margin is profit as a share of price. A product that costs 60 and sells for 100 has a 67% markup and a 40% margin.	Investopedia, Profit margin vs. markup
Discount strategy	Rules for when, to whom and how much a company cuts its price, such as volume, early-payment or seasonal discounts, set so discounts win sales without training customers to wait for them.	Harvard Business Review, Who Benefits from Price Promotions?, 2002

Unit economics and growth finance

8 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Revenue, profit, margin Full guide	Revenue is all the money received from sales. Profit is what is left after costs. Margin is profit as a percentage of revenue, which makes businesses of different sizes comparable.	Investopedia, Revenue vs. profit
Gross margin Full guide	Revenue minus the direct cost of what was sold, as a percentage of revenue. It shows how much of each sale is left to pay for marketing, salaries and everything else.	Investopedia, Gross margin
Break-even point Full guide	The sales volume at which income covers all costs and profit is zero. Below it the business loses money; above it every extra sale adds profit.	U.S. Small Business Administration, Break-even point
ROI	Return on investment: the gain from an investment minus its cost, divided by the cost. Spending 100 to earn 150 back is a 50% ROI.	Investopedia, Return on investment (ROI)
ROMI	Return on marketing investment: the profit that marketing spend brought in, minus that spend, divided by the spend. It should use margin, not revenue, or it overstates the return.	Farris, Bendle, Pfeifer, Reibstein, Marketing Metrics, Pearson / Wharton School Publishing
CAC Full guide	Customer acquisition cost: all sales and marketing spend in a period divided by the number of new customers won in that period.	Stripe, What is the CAC payback period?
LTV / CLV Full guide	Customer lifetime value: the total margin a customer brings over the whole relationship. Compared with CAC, it shows whether winning customers pays off.	Gupta, Lehmann, Stuart, Valuing Customers, Journal of Marketing Research, 2004
Average order value	Total revenue divided by the number of orders in a period. Raising it, for example with bundles, often costs less than finding new customers.	Shopify Help Center, Average order value

Analytics and metrics

5 terms

Term	What it means	Source
KPI Full guide	Key performance indicator: one of the few numbers a team agrees to watch because it shows whether a goal is being reached. A KPI needs an owner and a target, or it is just a statistic.	Investopedia, Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Metrics vs vanity metrics Full guide	Vanity metrics look good but do not change decisions, such as total page views. Actionable metrics show cause and effect, such as conversion by cohort. Eric Ries drew the line in The Lean Startup.	Eric Ries, Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics, 2009
Web analytics Full guide	Collecting and reading data about how people reach and use a website or app, to see which pages, channels and steps lead to the result the business wants.	Google Analytics Help, Introduction to Google Analytics
UTM tags Full guide	Short labels added to the end of a link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that tell analytics exactly which ad, email or post a visitor came from. The name comes from Urchin, the tool Google bought.	Google Analytics Help, Collect campaign data with custom URLs
Dashboard	One screen that shows the few numbers a person needs to monitor at a glance, updated automatically. Stephen Few's rule: it has to fit on one screen and be read in seconds.	Stephen Few, Information Dashboard Design, Perceptual Edge

Operations and process

5 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Business process Full guide	A repeatable set of steps that turns an input into a result for a customer or the company, such as "request to booked visit" or "invoice to payment", with an owner for each step.	ISO, ISO 9001 quality management principles (process approach)
SOP (standard operating procedure)Full guide	A written, step-by-step instruction for a routine task, so anyone doing it gets the same result. It says who does what, in what order, and what "done" looks like.	U.S. EPA, Guidance for Preparing Standard Operating Procedures (EPA QA/G-6)
Job description Full guide	A document that sets out a role's purpose, main duties, who it reports to and what skills it needs, used for hiring and for agreeing what the person is responsible for.	Acas (UK), Job description templates
Checklist	A short list of the critical steps that must not be skipped, read at set points in the work. Atul Gawande showed how simple checklists cut errors in surgery and other complex work.	Atul Gawande, The Checklist, The New Yorker, 2007
Delegation Full guide	Giving a task and the authority to decide on it to someone else, with a clear result and deadline, while keeping responsibility for the outcome.	Oncken and Wass, Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey?, Harvard Business Review, 1974

Goals, planning and execution

3 terms

Term	What it means	Source
SMART goals Full guide	Goals written to be specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-bound, so everyone can tell whether one was met. George Doran published the acronym in 1981.	George T. Doran, There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives, Management Review, 1981
Action plan Full guide	A list of the concrete steps needed to reach a goal, each with an owner, a deadline and the resources it needs, so the goal turns into work someone can start on Monday.	University of Kansas, Community Tool Box: Developing an action plan
Budgeting Full guide	Planning how much money will come in and go out over a period, by line and by month, then comparing the plan with what happened to decide what to change.	Investopedia, Budget

Organization and people

4 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Org chart Full guide	A diagram of who reports to whom and which teams exist. One of the earliest known examples was drawn for the New York and Erie Railroad in 1855.	Library of Congress, Diagram representing a plan of organization, New York and Erie Railroad, 1855
Company culture Full guide	The shared, often unwritten assumptions about how work is really done in a company: what gets rewarded, what gets ignored and how people treat each other. Edgar Schein's model is the standard reference.	MIT Sloan, 5 enduring management ideas from MIT Sloan's Edgar Schein
Employee onboarding	The planned first weeks and months of a new hire: access, training, introductions and early goals, so the person becomes productive and stays.	Talya Bauer, Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success, SHRM Foundation
One-on-one meetings	A regular private meeting between a manager and one team member, with an agenda both add to, to talk about progress, problems and growth. Andy Grove made it a core management habit in High Output Management.	Google re:Work, Hold effective 1:1 meetings

Decisions and mental models

3 terms

Term	What it means	Source
Decision matrix Full guide	A table that scores several options against weighted criteria, such as cost, speed and risk, so a choice can be compared on the same terms instead of by gut feel.	ASQ, Decision matrix
Pros and cons (weighted)	Listing the reasons for and against a choice and giving each a weight. Benjamin Franklin described the method in a 1772 letter, calling it "moral or prudential algebra".	Founders Online, Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, 19 September 1772
Cognitive biases Full guide	Predictable errors in judgement that come from mental shortcuts, such as anchoring on the first number heard. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman documented many of them in 1974.	Tversky and Kahneman, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science, 1974

Product and innovation

3 terms

Term	What it means	Source
MVP (minimum viable product)Full guide	The smallest version of a product that lets a team learn the most about customers with the least effort. Frank Robinson coined the term; Eric Ries popularised it.	Agile Alliance, Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Product roadmap Full guide	A plan of what a product team will build and why, in rough order over time, linked to goals rather than a fixed list of features with exact dates.	Atlassian, What is a product roadmap?
User story Full guide	A short description of a feature from the user's side: "As a [role], I want [action] so that [benefit]." It keeps work focused on what the person needs.	Agile Alliance, User stories

AI in marketing and operations

3 terms

Term	What it means	Source
AI in marketing Full guide	Using machine learning and generative AI for marketing work, such as drafting copy, analysing data, bidding on ads or answering enquiries, with people checking the output.	McKinsey, The state of AI
Prompt engineering	Writing and testing the instructions given to an AI model (context, task, examples and the format wanted) so it produces useful, consistent output.	Anthropic, Prompt engineering overview
AI content guidelines Full guide	A company's rules for using AI to create content: what it may be used for, who checks facts, how it is disclosed and what is off limits. Google ranks content on quality, not on whether AI helped.	Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content

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