What this lesson covers
What is marketing really for, and why does digital change how it works?
- Marketing vs. selling vs. advertising
- The marketing concept and customer value
- Owned, earned, shared and paid media
- Marketplaces as rented storefronts: Amazon, Etsy, DoorDash, Angi and Thumbtack
- AI (artificial intelligence) as a marketing collaborator
- Digital marketing ethics and consumer trust
Why this matters now
Placeholder for the lesson's opening story: a vivid, real moment where a marketer or small-business owner meets this exact problem.
You can now
Explain how marketing creates customer value, and sort any business's channels into paid, earned, shared and owned media.
For your own business or employer: Map where a business's attention comes from before anyone spends a dollar on more of it.
Industry case studies
Industry Case
Tepary Kitchen
Local restaurant · Local and offline
Case update 1.1
Module 1 of 8 in this case
Whose customer is it?
It's 7:40 on a Tuesday night in August. Rosa Tafoya stands at the pass of Tepary Kitchen and counts 11 filled seats out of 96. Her line cook asks if he can clock out early. Then the tablet on the counter chimes. Another delivery order: $41. About $11 of it stays with the app.
Rosa knows these customers love her food. She doesn't know a single one of their names.
That's the difference between a storefront you own and one you rent. The delivery app brings real orders. But it owns the relationship: the name, the address, the next order. When Rosa needs to fill a slow Tuesday, she can't call anyone. She can only hope.
So Rosa and her husband Miguel do what this lesson asks you to do. They trace their last 100 guests. Twenty-eight came through delivery apps. Nine booked through a reservation platform. The rest walked in: regulars, neighbors, friends of friends. Then they sort every channel as owned, earned, shared or paid, and ask one more question: if this channel vanished tomorrow, could we still reach these people?
For 37 of the 100, the answer is no.
Artifact added
Rented vs. owned storefront audit: the last 100 customers by channel, and who owns each relationship
Industry Case
Bajada Plumbing & Drain
Local home service · Demand capture
Case update 1.1
Module 1 of 8 in this case
The voicemail that said “never mind”
At 2:10 on a July morning, a water heater gives out in a hallway closet. The homeowner calls Bajada Plumbing & Drain. She gets a recording: office hours are seven to five. She hangs up and calls the next name on the map. A person answers on the second ring.
At 7:05 a.m., Carmen Delgado, who runs Bajada's office, plays the voicemail. Eleven seconds of running water. Then: “Never mind.”
Her brother Ray has spent 30 years believing marketing is something other plumbers do. Bajada grew on their father's name, a magnet sign and neighbors telling neighbors. So Carmen pulls the last 100 jobs. Forty-five came from referrals and repeat customers. Thirty-five came from home-service marketplace leads, shared with three other plumbers, at about $55 a lead. Fifteen found Bajada on Google. Five, nobody knows.
“So the marketplaces work,” Ray says. They do. But at a 30% close rate, each marketplace job costs about $183 before anyone picks up a wrench. Marketing, Carmen tells him, isn't the ad. It's everything that makes the phone ring for you, and makes you answer it.
Artifact added
Customer source tally: the last 100 jobs by channel and cost per job
Industry Case
Ocotillo & Ash
DTC fashion · Demand creation
Case update 1.1
Module 1 of 8 in this case
The best weekend that lost money
On a Sunday night in late June, Lena Ortiz watches the dashboard of Ocotillo & Ash pass 212 orders. Her 30%-off Summer Heat sale is the best weekend her clothing brand has ever had. She posts the screenshot.
A week later she's at the kitchen table with the ad invoice, 47 return labels and a napkin. At 30% off, after the clothes, the shipping, the fees, the returns and the ads, every one of those orders lost about $10.
Lena thinks she has a marketing problem. She has a selling habit. Selling pushes what's on the shelf. Marketing starts earlier: who is this for, what do they need, and why us?
Of her last 100 orders, 71 started with a paid ad, 40 used a discount code and only 12 came from her own email list of 6,200 people. Her clothes are cut for 110-degree days, but her ads look like everyone else's linen ads, shot in a cool gray studio. This semester she'll find out whether “made for the heat” is the real reason her best customers buy.
Artifact added
Order source tally: the last 100 orders by channel and discount
Listen
Podcast · Move at the Speed of Culture
Why Good Marketing No Longer Works
Listen for why tactics that used to work get ignored now, and what that says about where buyers spend their attention.
More from Move at the Speed of Culture →
Listen online: moveatthespeedofculture.com/why-good-marketing-no-longer-works
Key terms
- Advertising: Paid, sponsored messages placed in media to reach an audience. Advertising is one tool inside marketing, not a synonym for it.
- AI (artificial intelligence): Software that performs tasks that normally need human judgment, such as writing, summarizing, analyzing data or generating images. In marketing it works best as a collaborator whose output a person checks.
- Consumer trust: A customer's confidence that a business will keep its promises, protect their data and treat them fairly. It takes a long time to earn and very little to lose.
- Customer value: The difference between the benefits a customer believes they get from a product and the total cost to them (money, time, effort and risk).
- Digital marketing: Marketing carried out through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, text messages and apps, where results can usually be measured.
- Digital marketing ethics: The standards of honesty, fairness, privacy and respect a marketer follows when collecting data and persuading people online.
- Earned media: Attention a business doesn't pay for and doesn't control: press coverage, reviews, word of mouth and shares by other people.
- Generative AI: AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, that create new text, images, audio or video from a prompt.
- Marketing: The work of understanding what people need, creating something of value for them and communicating it so they choose it. It covers research, product, price, distribution and promotion, not just ads.
- Marketing concept: The business philosophy that an organization reaches its goals by identifying customer needs and satisfying them better than competitors do.
- Marketplace: A third-party platform, such as Amazon, Etsy, DoorDash, Angi or Thumbtack, that brings buyers and sellers together and usually takes a fee or commission on each sale.
- Owned media: Channels a business controls, such as its website, email list, blog and YouTube channel.
- Paid media: Attention a business buys, such as search ads, social ads, sponsored posts and paid creator partnerships.
- PESO model: A framework (popularized by Gini Dietrich) that groups marketing channels into Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned media.
- Rented storefront: A way of describing a marketplace or social platform: the business gets traffic, but the platform owns the customer relationship and can change the rules or fees at any time.
- Selling: The one-to-one effort of persuading a specific buyer to complete a purchase. Selling closes the deal; marketing creates the conditions that make the deal possible.
- Shared media: Social media content and conversations on platforms the business uses but does not own, such as Instagram, TikTok or Facebook.