"Have you ever been in a conversation with other marketers," asks Beth Harte in a post at the Daily Fix blog, "and you get the sense that even though you are talking about marketing, sometimes you aren't on the same page about how marketing should work, be implemented or the direction it's headed?"

There are several reasons for the disconnect, she argues, but three can be traced to the ideas you encounter while during your learning curve:

• It all begins at the university level—especially in publish-or-perish environments—when your professors orient classes to their own agendas and research goals, which might not be shared by their colleagues.
• It continues in your first or second job, as you adapt to an employer's agenda, which might be quite unlike those of your professors.
• Finally, after five or ten years of experience, you start to develop strategies based on your own agenda.

"Now multiply these three experiences by all the marketers out there," notes Harte. "It's amazing there's any agreement at all on marketing best practices."

Her post sparked an interesting conversation in the comments section, with observations like those from Allen Weiss, MarketingProfs CEO, who believes we should begin by agreeing on the definitions of terms we use.

"Ask a finance person what NPV is and how to calculate it, and you'll likely get the same answer just about anywhere you go in the world," he says. If you ask a marketer to define a segment, however, you'll get a thousand different answers, he points out.

"[W]e haven't put our collective arms around how to define, discuss and proceed with our discipline," says Jeanne Bliss in the comments section. Our Marketing Inspiration is to find that common verbal ground.

More Inspiration:
Michael Rubin: Did Galileo Inspire Social Media? Four Parallel Observations.
Mack Collier: Have You Ever Seen an $11,000.00 Tweet?
Stephanie Miller: Email Lesson From The White House: Permission Matters!

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