Major·Fluent

№ 15 · 8 modules × roughly 3 hours

Marketing

Understand customers, positioning, channels, brands, and the disciplined work of creating demand.

In 24 hours you will become fluent in customer research, segmentation, positioning, brand strategy, channel choices, funnels, campaign design, measurement, and the hard tradeoffs behind demand creation—enough to critique a go-to-market plan and write a sharper one without pretending marketing has magic formulas.

Time
8 modules × roughly 3 hours
Difficulty
Introductory but serious
Adjacent fields
Business Administration · Communications · Psychology · Data Science · Product Management · Sales

Contents

8 modules · ~3h each · ~24h total
01
Field Orientation

Define marketing, why it exists, what practitioners actually do, and why outsiders confuse it with advertising.

02
Vocabulary Immersion

Build enough shared language to follow marketing conversations without nodding through fuzzy words.

03
Mental Models

Practice the ways marketers think about customers, demand, attention, trust, tradeoffs, and learning.

04
Frameworks and Theories

Use canonical structures that organize marketing decisions without worshiping frameworks.

05
Methods and Tools

See how marketing work gets done: research, creative briefs, experiments, campaigns, analytics, and operating rhythms.

06
Canonical Cases and Debates

Study representative marketing moments, thinkers, and live disagreements so the field feels real instead of generic.

07
Applied Project Studio

Produce a representative marketing artifact: a positioning brief plus a launch campaign outline.

08
Synthesis and Fit

Convert the sprint into field fluency, honest fit judgment, and a next 30-day path.

After this sprint, you can…

Fluency, not mastery
  • Use Marketing's core vocabulary without bluffing.
  • Recognize the field’s major debates and the tradeoffs behind them.
  • Ask sharper questions of practitioners, books, courses, and AI tools.
  • Read entry-level sources with enough context to judge them.
  • Spot common beginner overclaims — including ones an AI might make.
  • Decide whether deeper study, expert help, or formal training is worth it.

Canonical frameworks

  • Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning (STP)
  • Jobs to be Done
  • 4Ps marketing mix: product, price, place, promotion
  • Customer journey and funnel analysis
  • Brand equity and distinctive assets
  • Mental and physical availability
  • Creative brief and message hierarchy
  • Experimentation, attribution, and incrementality

Live debates

  • Brand building vs performance marketing
    Budget, creative, measurement windows, and executive expectations change depending on which side dominates. Healthy teams usually need both.
  • Customer-led discovery vs visionary category creation
    The wrong balance produces either incremental sameness or founder fantasy detached from demand.
  • Persuasion vs manipulation
    Short-term conversion tactics can create legal, reputational, and moral debt. It changes budget, creative, measurement, and customer-trust decisions.
  • Mass reach vs narrow targeting
    The right answer depends on category size, purchase frequency, budget, channel economics, and maturity.

Source trail

7 notes
  1. Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, for segmentation, positioning, and marketing mix foundations.
  2. Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute materials for mental availability, physical availability, and evidence-led brand growth debates.
  3. April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, for practical positioning process and category/frame-of-reference work.
  4. Clayton Christensen et al., jobs-to-be-done writing including Competing Against Luck, for demand-side customer progress language.
  5. Google Analytics, Meta Blueprint, HubSpot Academy, and Nielsen/IPA public materials for channel, measurement, and brand/performance vocabulary.
  6. Harvard Business School and public university intro marketing syllabi for canonical cases, ethics topics, and go-to-market assignments.
  7. American Marketing Association definitions and ethics resources for professional terminology and caveats.

Watch the field

3 curated videos · included

This field includes a curated shelf of 3 hand-picked free explainer videos — vetted from trusted educators and embedded so you can watch them in context, without falling down the YouTube rabbit hole. A small bonus on top of the eight-module sprint; it unlocks with the field.

Ask better questions of AI

Fluency is leverage

Fluency in Marketing makes AI far more useful: you know what to ask, you can judge the answer, and you know when to check a primary source or a practitioner instead. Once you've done this sprint, prompts like these get real work done — using the field's own frameworks and debates:

  • I'm new to Marketing. Define <term> the way a practitioner would, give one realistic example, and flag where beginners misuse it.
  • Apply Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning (STP) to <my situation> and show your reasoning — then list what could make this analysis wrong.
  • Lay out both sides of: Brand building vs performance marketing Give the strongest evidence for each, and say where practitioners still disagree.
  • Critique my plan using Jobs to be Done. What assumptions would a Marketing practitioner question?
  • What primary sources or practitioners should I check before trusting your answer on <topic> in Marketing?

Expert · AI · Source. Use AI to orient and draft, primary sources to verify claims that matter, and a practitioner when judgment, liability, or nuance is on the line. Fluency is what lets you tell which is which.

What this sprint does not do

This is field fluency, not mastery — and not credit, licensure, or professional authority. It does not qualify you to practice Marketing where supervision, certification, or a license is required. It gives you the operating language and judgment to learn faster, ask better questions, work with AI and experts, and decide your next move.