demand generation

Definition

Marketing activities designed to create interest in a product or service where none previously existed, rather than just capturing existing demand. Building the haystack before finding the needle.

Example Usage

We're doing demand generation for our AI-powered toothbrush by educating people about problems they didn't know they had.

Origin

B2B marketing terminology popularized in the 2000s

Source: B2B and enterprise marketing terminology

Related Terms

Intermediate

Lead Generation

The process of finding people who might want to buy your stuff, which mostly involves bribing strangers with free ebooks in exchange for their email addresses. It's essentially the corporate version of trick-or-treating, but you're the one handing out candy.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

ecommerce

The art of selling stuff online instead of in physical stores, revolutionizing retail by eliminating the need to wear pants while shopping. It encompasses everything from Amazon's global empire to your neighbor's Etsy shop selling handmade soap. Born in the '90s, it's now the default way humans acquire everything from groceries to furniture, much to the despair of malls everywhere.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Advanced

imputation

In data science and marketing analytics, the practice of filling in missing data with educated guesses when reality refuses to cooperate with your spreadsheet. It's essentially statistical fortune-telling that lets you pretend your dataset is complete. Data scientists treat it as sophisticated methodology; everyone else calls it making stuff up with math.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

Content Marketing

The art of selling things to people by pretending you're not selling things to people. You write a helpful blog post about productivity tips, and somehow by the end, the reader is buying your project management software.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

curated

The pretentious way of saying 'I picked these things' that makes your personal choices sound like a museum exhibition. Originally meant for actual curators managing art collections, now it's slapped on everything from Spotify playlists to food truck festivals. It's taste and selectivity rebranded as expertise, turning your morning routine into a 'curated experience.'

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

conversion

The holy grail of digital marketing: that magical moment when a casual browser transforms into a paying customer, newsletter subscriber, or whatever action you've been desperately optimizing for. It's the difference between window shopping and actually buying, measured obsessively through analytics dashboards and celebrated with metaphorical champagne in Slack channels. Every marketer's job basically boils down to increasing this single metric, which explains why you get retargeted ads for shoes you looked at once, three years ago.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

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