This glossary breaks down the key terms shaping modern marketing execution and procurement strategy—covering everything from performance-based compensation and supply chain design to omnichannel delivery and data-driven optimization. It’s designed to help CMOs, procurement leads, and marketing operations teams speak a shared language of efficiency, alignment, and growth.
Glossary of Terms
Advanced Meta Models: Predictive data models built on thousands of behavioral and demographic attributes to refine audience targeting and improve campaign ROI.
Behavioral Science in Marketing: Applying psychological principles to influence customer decision-making. Used in creative development to improve engagement and response in marketing campaigns.
Brand Box: A curated package of physical marketing materials—such as brochures, product samples, promotional items, or branded merchandise—designed to represent a brand’s identity and value proposition. Often used for product launches, influencer campaigns, retail onboarding, or customer engagement, brand boxes are a tangible extension of a brand’s experience.
Branded Merchandise: Physical products—such as apparel, drinkware, tech accessories, office supplies, or promotional giveaways—customized with a company’s logo, colors, or messaging. These items are used to increase brand visibility, drive engagement, and strengthen customer or employee loyalty.
Consolidated Spend: Centralizing vendor selection and purchase decisions across marketing functions to improve spend visibility, negotiate better rates, and streamline execution.
Conversion Maximization: Tactics that improve the likelihood of turning a response into a sale or engagement. This includes timing delivery for call center load balancing or tailoring offers to customer profiles.
Creative Optimization: The practice of using testing, behavioral science, and message refinement to increase campaign effectiveness—especially in direct mail. This includes optimizing headlines, offers, and calls to action (CTAs) based on data.
Creative Production: The end-to-end process of transforming marketing concepts into finalized, ready-to-deploy assets across channels like print, digital, video, and in-store. It includes design adaptation, versioning, copy editing, file preparation, prepress, proofing, and asset delivery—ensuring creative is executed accurately, efficiently, and on brand.
Creative Services: The strategic and production-based functions involved in developing marketing and branding assets. This includes concept development, photography, design, copywriting, video production, layout, art direction, retouching, and premedia—delivered either by in-house teams, agencies, or specialized vendors.
Customized Supply Chain Solutions: Tailored operational frameworks designed for each client’s marketing execution needs. This includes integrating vendors, logistics, and print partners into a future-state model that meets time, cost, and delivery requirements.
Direct Mail: A high-performance physical marketing channel where personalized printed materials are mailed directly to consumers. Known for high engagement, strong response rates, and synergy with digital campaigns.
Due Diligence (Marketing Execution): A comprehensive evaluation process to assess client needs and quantify opportunities before proposing a solution—ensuring transparency and a tailored approach.
Dynamic Sourcing: An agile procurement model that combines multiple suppliers across time zones and geographies, enabling 24/7 production and cost optimization.
Efficiency-Based Compensation: A compensation model in which a provider shares in the cost savings they generate for the client, only after those net savings are realized—promoting transparency and financial alignment.
Effectiveness-Based Compensation: A compensation model where provider fees are tied to actual performance outcomes (e.g., revenue lift, increased conversions), reinforcing accountability and shared success.
Experiential Marketing: A strategy that engages consumers through branded, interactive experiences—designed to create memorable, emotional connections between a brand and its audience. Unlike traditional advertising, experiential marketing invites participation, often through live events, pop-ups, product sampling, installations, or immersive environments.
Fiduciary Role in Procurement: Acting in the client’s best interest by providing objective, vendor-agnostic recommendations and transparent execution strategies—especially important in performance-based partnerships.
Flexible Sourcing Strategies: Procurement methods that prioritize supplier diversification—domestically and globally—to adapt quickly to market changes, reduce risk, and avoid production delays.
Follow-the-Sun Model: A global workflow strategy that leverages time zone differences across offshore and onshore teams to provide continuous, around-the-clock production and delivery. In the context of marketing execution and creative services, it enables work to move seamlessly from one region to another—so when one team finishes their day, another picks up the task, significantly reducing turnaround times.
Hybrid Onshore-Offshore Model: A hybrid onshore-offshore model combines domestic (onshore) and international (offshore) resources to execute marketing services and creative production at scale. This approach allows brands to balance cost efficiency with quality control, speed, and collaborative flexibility.
Marketing Execution: The process of turning marketing strategy into action by managing the production, distribution, and delivery of marketing assets across physical and digital channels. Effective marketing execution ensures that campaigns are launched on time, on budget, and with consistency—often involving coordination across creative, procurement, logistics, and media teams.
Marketing Outsourcing: The practice of partnering with external vendors, agencies, or execution partners to handle specific marketing functions or full campaigns. This can include services such as creative development, direct mail execution, media buying, digital production, vendor management, and strategic sourcing.
Offshore (Marketing Strategy): The practice of leveraging international teams, vendors, or production facilities—typically in lower-cost regions outside a company's home country—to support marketing operations. In marketing strategy, offshore execution is commonly used for services like creative production, asset versioning, direct mail fulfillment, and digital development.
Omnichannel Marketing Execution: The coordination of messaging and delivery across both physical and digital marketing touchpoints—like email, direct mail, paid media, and retail—to create a cohesive brand experience.
Onshore (Marketing Strategy): Marketing services, teams, or production partners located within a company’s home country. In the context of marketing strategy and execution, onshore resources are often used for functions requiring closer collaboration, faster turnaround, cultural alignment, or stricter quality control—such as creative strategy, campaign management, vendor oversight, or high-touch production work.
Performance-Based Contracts: Vendor agreements tied to measurable outcomes—such as cost savings or production efficiency—rather than fixed fees alone.
Performance-Based Marketing: A results-driven approach where compensation is based on measurable business outcomes like profit increase, ROI, or cost savings—ensuring accountability and alignment with client success.
Physical Channels: Tangible touchpoints like direct mail, packaging, brochures, or in-store displays that create a physical brand experience and complement digital tactics.
Procurement as a Growth Partner: Positioning procurement not just as a cost control function, but as a strategic advisor that contributes to business growth, marketing performance, and competitive differentiation.
Procurement-Marketing Alignment: Cross-functional collaboration between procurement and marketing to stretch budgets, ensure brand consistency, and deliver measurable campaign performance.
Retail Marketing Solutions: The strategies, services, and tools used to promote products and engage customers at the point of sale—both in physical retail environments and through omnichannel touchpoints. These solutions can include in-store signage, displays, shelf talkers, packaging, branded merchandise, window graphics, store kits, experiential marketing, events, and integrated campaigns that drive foot traffic and boost conversions.
Seamless Project Management: An execution model where a partner acts as an extension of the client’s internal team, managing logistics, production, timelines, and vendor coordination—freeing up internal bandwidth.
Strategic Data Advantage: Access to exclusive or high-quality data sources—like credit and demographic files—that allow for more precise segmentation, targeting, and audience modeling.
Strategic Marketing Procurement: A collaborative, data-driven approach to sourcing marketing services and materials—focused on optimizing ROI, reducing costs, and ensuring alignment between procurement and marketing teams.
Supplier Network: A curated and vetted collection of approved vendors and service providers. Continuum, for example, leverages over 450 North American suppliers to ensure flexibility, redundancy, and scale.
Supplier Sourcing: The strategic evaluation and selection of vendors to fulfill marketing production, logistics, or fulfillment needs, factoring in cost, quality, and risk.
Supply Chain Optimization: A strategy that evaluates and re-engineers the full marketing production and delivery chain—including manufacturing, freight, and postage—to reduce cost, increase speed, and improve delivery accuracy.
Tariff-Driven Cost Pressures: Economic challenges caused by fluctuating import/export tariffs that increase the cost of goods such as printed materials, packaging, and promotional merchandise.
Tariffs: Government-imposed taxes on imported goods. In marketing procurement, tariffs can impact production and shipping costs, requiring diversified sourcing and agile execution strategies.
Transparent Pricing Models: Open-book or cost-plus vendor arrangements that provide full visibility into fees, markups, and actual production costs—supporting better budgeting and accountability.
Vendor Independence: An asset-light, neutral sourcing model in which the marketing execution partner is not tied to any one vendor, allowing them to select the best-fit suppliers and prioritize client needs over owned assets.
Vendor Management: The process of overseeing vendor relationships, ensuring contract compliance, performance tracking, and long-term alignment with marketing goals.
Take the Next Step on Your Journey to More Productive Marketing
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