Marketing glossary
A marketing glossary defines the terms growth and demand teams use to describe audiences, spend, and pipeline. It covers how demand is targeted and qualified — ICP, segmentation, lifecycle marketing — and how it is measured once it moves: attribution, pipeline velocity, and the funnel stages in between. These definitions matter most at the handover points, where marketing, sales, and support each use the same word to mean something slightly different. Each entry below gives a plain-language definition, and where a term is a measurable, the formula and a typical range. Related terms are linked so you can follow a thread rather than search twice.
Competitive intelligence
Competitive intelligence is the structured collection and analysis of information about rival products, pricing, service levels, and customer sentiment. Good competitive intelligence draws only from legitimate sources, such as reviews, published pricing pages, and customer conversations. It never relies on confidential or improperly obtained material. In a contact center, customers often name competitors directly in tickets, calls, and reviews, usually without being asked. OnClarity’s Voice of Customer aggregates feedback from 100+ sources and classifies it by topic and sentiment. That means a company can tag every competitor mention automatically. For example, a retailer notices a recurring theme: customers who mention a competitor by name almost always cite one missing integration. That single, specific feature gap turns out to be the real reason customers switch, not price or service quality in general.
Customer acquisition cost
CAC
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures what a company spends to win one new customer. The formula is total sales and marketing spend over a period, divided by new customers acquired in that period. A complete figure includes paid media, salaries for sales and marketing staff, tooling, and agency fees. Counting media spend alone is a common error that understates true cost. Blended CAC covers all customers, including those from organic and referral channels. Paid CAC isolates only paid-channel spend. CAC only means something alongside the LTV:CAC ratio and payback period, the months needed to recoup acquisition cost.
Customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups distinct enough in behavior or need to warrant different treatment. That different treatment might mean different messaging, pricing, service levels, or product priorities. Standard bases include demographic and firmographic factors (company size, industry, revenue for B2B), behavioral patterns (usage, purchase frequency), needs-based groupings, and value-based segmentation. A segment is only useful if it is measurable, reachable through existing channels, and large enough to justify a distinct strategy. This matters for brand health tracking: a single averaged score can mask sharp declines within one segment while others improve. GrubHub works against that risk by turning feedback into insights that shape its roadmap, with updates shared to 100+ staff weekly rather than read in fragments.
Browse other categories
Customer experience
How teams measure, diagnose, and improve what it feels like to be a customer.
Customer support
The operational vocabulary of contact centres — queues, handle time, resolution, and deflection.
Product management
The language product teams use to prioritise, scope, and measure what they build.
Brand
How marketing, brand and communications teams define, position, and measure a brand over time.
AI and automation
The terms behind AI agents, automation, and the metrics that prove they work.
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