I was recently asked by Kent Huffman to provide my personal definition of marketing for his blog Systemic Marketing. The point of the exercise was to compile definitions from Kent’s uber-helpful list of top marketing professors on Twitter.

A scary challenge, figuring out how to define marketing in a fresh and relevant way while knowing your answer will be published alongside some of the smartest marketers on the planet.

After much thought, my answer came to me by way of analogy: the marketer as diplomat.

In a modern organization, in the purest form of the craft, the marketing function and thus the marketer serves as an ambassador.

By this, I mean that the successful marketer must live among customers and prospects (physically and, more and more often, virtually):

He or she must strive to faithfully understand their cultures, desires, hopes, and fears;

He or she must endeavor to bring their unfiltered voices back into the organization and then participate at the highest levels internally to implement that feedback loop into every aspect of the operation;

He or she must honestly and sensitively communicate back to the customers what the organization is doing, can, and will do to meet their needs;

He or she must oversee the creation of efficient opportunities for customers and employees to interact directly;

And finally, he or she must do all of this through ongoing (i.e., not episodic) efforts that are highly strategic, carefully measured, regularly analyzed, and consistently optimized.

Ok, not a tight definition (hey, this is for academia). But one that I think is at once aspirational and achievable.