Growth, in plain terms.

The vocabulary of modern growth — measurement, acquisition, organic, lifecycle, and brand — defined the way we use it with clients. No jargon for its own sake.

Strategy

Growth System: A growth system is the connected set of channels, data, and creative that compounds acquisition and retention over time, as opposed to a one-off campaign that resets to zero when the budget stops. The distinction is durability: a system gets cheaper and more effective the longer it runs.
Unit Economics: Unit economics are the revenue and costs associated with a single customer or order — most often the relationship between customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). Healthy unit economics are the precondition for spending more on growth, not a result of it.
Product-Market Fit: Product-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies strong demand in a well-defined market, evidenced by organic pull, retention, and word of mouth. Marketing scales product-market fit; it cannot manufacture it, which is why we look for it before recommending acquisition spend.
North Star Metric: A North Star metric is the single measure that best captures the value a product delivers to customers and predicts durable revenue. It aligns teams around outcomes rather than vanity activity, and it is the number a growth program is ultimately accountable to.
Full-Funnel Marketing: Full-funnel marketing coordinates awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention as one system instead of optimizing each stage in isolation. The benefit is that demand creation and demand capture stop competing for credit and start compounding.
Retainer vs. Project: A project engagement delivers a defined scope on a fixed timeline (a launch, a redesign, a campaign); a retainer is an ongoing partnership that runs and improves a growth system month over month. Projects suit discrete needs; retainers suit compounding ones.

Acquisition

Performance Marketing: Performance marketing is paid acquisition bought and optimized against a measurable action — a lead, a purchase, an install — rather than against reach. It spans paid search, paid social, and other biddable channels and lives or dies on the quality of its measurement.
Paid Media: Paid media is any channel where you pay to place a message — search ads, social ads, display, video, and programmatic. It rents attention for as long as you fund it, which makes it fast to scale and immediate to stop.
Demand Generation: Demand generation is the work of creating new interest in a category or product among people who were not already searching for it. It fills the top of the funnel and is measured over quarters, not clicks.
Demand Capture: Demand capture is the work of converting people who already have intent — through search, retargeting, and high-intent landing pages. It is efficient but finite: you can only capture the demand that already exists.
CPM (Cost per Mille): CPM is the cost to serve one thousand ad impressions. It is the base currency of awareness buying and a useful efficiency signal, but it says nothing on its own about whether those impressions converted.
CPC (Cost per Click): CPC is the price paid each time someone clicks an ad. It bridges impressions and on-site behavior, but a low CPC only matters if those clicks go on to convert at an acceptable cost.
Value-Based Bidding: Value-based bidding optimizes ad auctions toward the predicted value of a customer — not just the count of conversions — by feeding revenue or predicted LTV signals back to the platform. It moves spend toward the customers worth the most, rather than the cheapest conversions.

Measurement

CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): CAC is the fully loaded cost of acquiring one new customer — media plus creative, tooling, and the people who run the program — divided by customers acquired. Reported honestly, it is usually higher than the media-only figure most teams cite.
LTV (Lifetime Value): LTV is the total contribution margin a customer is expected to generate over the life of the relationship. Used well it is discounted for the time value of money; used carelessly it overstates the case for spending more.
LTV:CAC Ratio: The LTV:CAC ratio compares the lifetime value of a customer to the cost of acquiring them. It is the headline health metric of a growth program, but it is only meaningful when both numbers are calculated against contribution margin rather than revenue.
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): ROAS is revenue divided by the ad spend that is credited with producing it. It is the most-cited and most-misread number in paid media, because platform-reported ROAS often counts revenue that would have happened anyway.
MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio): MER, or blended ROAS, is total revenue divided by total marketing spend across every channel. Because it ignores attribution entirely, it is a useful sanity check against the inflated, double-counted returns individual platforms report.
AOV (Average Order Value): AOV is the average revenue per order over a period. It is a lever on acquisition economics — raising AOV widens the room you have to spend on acquiring a customer — but it should be evaluated against margin, not revenue alone.
Contribution Margin: Contribution margin is the money left from a sale after the variable costs of delivering it — goods, shipping, processing, returns, discounts. It is the correct denominator for evaluating CAC, because it is what the business can actually reinvest in growth.
Payback Period: Payback period is the time it takes for a customer's contribution margin to repay the cost of acquiring them. The shorter it is, the faster acquisition spend recycles into more growth — which matters most for businesses with a high cost of capital.
Attribution: Attribution is the practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that preceded it. Every model is wrong in a different direction, so the useful question is not which model is correct but which decision the model is informing.
Incrementality: Incrementality measures how many conversions a channel actually caused — the ones that would not have happened without it — usually via a holdout or geo test. It is the antidote to attribution, which credits channels for demand they merely intercepted.
MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling): Marketing mix modeling uses statistical analysis of historical spend and outcomes to estimate each channel's contribution to revenue. It is privacy-durable because it needs no user-level tracking, which has made it central again in the post-cookie era.
Holdout Test: A holdout test withholds advertising from a randomly selected or geographically matched control group and compares total outcomes against a group that still sees it. The difference is the true incremental lift the spend produced.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): CRO is the discipline of increasing the share of visitors who take the desired action through structured testing of pages, offers, and flows. It compounds every other channel, because a higher conversion rate lowers the effective cost of all incoming traffic.
First-Party Data: First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own audience with consent — purchases, site behavior, email and SMS engagement. As third-party tracking degrades, it has become the most durable foundation for both targeting and measurement.

Organic & Search

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the practice of earning unpaid visibility in search engines through technical health, relevant content, and authority. It compounds over months and lowers blended acquisition cost, but it does not turn on like paid media does.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): AEO is the practice of structuring content and data so AI assistants and answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI overviews — can retrieve and quote it accurately. In practice it means clean structured data, clear entity information, and content that answers questions directly.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): GEO is optimizing to be cited by generative AI systems when they compose answers. It overlaps with AEO and SEO but emphasizes being a quotable, well-grounded source — through structured data, factual clarity, and a consistent entity presence across the web.
SERP (Search Engine Results Page): The SERP is the page a search engine returns for a query, increasingly composed of AI overviews, featured snippets, maps, and ads alongside the classic blue links. Winning organic traffic now means competing for those features, not just for position one.
Content Marketing: Content marketing is the creation of useful, relevant material that earns attention and trust rather than buying it. Done well it feeds SEO, lifecycle, and sales at once; done poorly it is volume without a point.
Backlink: A backlink is a link from another website to yours, and remains one of the strongest signals of authority in organic search. Quality and relevance matter far more than volume — a single link from a trusted source outweighs many from weak ones.

Lifecycle & Retention

Lifecycle Marketing: Lifecycle marketing is the owned-channel program — email, SMS, and community — that moves a customer from first purchase to loyal repeat buyer. It is usually the highest-margin growth a brand has and the most underfunded.
Churn: Churn is the rate at which customers stop buying or cancel over a period. It is the silent tax on growth: a program can acquire efficiently and still shrink if churn outpaces acquisition.
Retention: Retention is the share of customers who keep buying over time, and the engine of durable growth. Because acquiring a customer costs more than keeping one, small retention gains usually move the business more than equivalent acquisition gains.
Segmentation: Segmentation is dividing an audience into groups by behavior, value, or lifecycle stage so messaging and offers can be tailored to each. It is what separates a lifecycle program that compounds from a broadcast list that burns out.
Owned Media: Owned media is the audience and channels a business controls directly — its email and SMS lists, site, and community — as opposed to rented (paid) or earned reach. It is the hedge against rising ad costs and degrading platform signal.

Creative & Brand

Creative System: A creative system is a repeatable framework — templates, principles, and a production pipeline — that lets a brand ship on-brand, on-message creative at volume without reinventing each asset. It turns creative from a bottleneck into an engine.
Brand Marketing: Brand marketing builds durable demand, recognition, and pricing power over time, rather than capturing response in the moment. It is the long-cycle counterpart to performance marketing, and the two work best funded together.
Creative Velocity: Creative velocity is the rate at which a team learns from its creative, not merely the rate at which it ships. Shipping forty ads a week is volume; learning something from those forty is velocity, and only the second one compounds.
Positioning: Positioning is the category and frame of comparison a brand chooses to compete inside. It is upstream of acquisition cost: the category you claim sets what buyers expect to pay and who they compare you against.
UGC (User-Generated Content): UGC is content created by customers or creators rather than the brand's studio — reviews, unboxings, testimonials, and creator videos. It performs because it reads as authentic proof rather than advertising, and it scales creative supply.

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