What if marketing isn't a department?
What if it's the operating system of everything?
Everything is marketing. And marketing is everything.
We usually think of marketing as advertising, social media, SEO, branding, funnels, or customer acquisition.
But that's only the visible surface.
A product communicates.
A user interface communicates.
A founder communicates.
A pricing model communicates.
An algorithm communicates.
A community communicates.
Even silence communicates.
Every decision creates a signal.
And every signal changes perception.
That is the idea behind Marketing Taxonomy AI.
🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/modarresi1913/marketing-taxonomy-ai
The Problem: Marketing Has Become Too Large for Its Own Vocabulary
Marketing has exploded.
We now have:
- Content Marketing
- Performance Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Growth Marketing
- Product Marketing
- Community Marketing
- Experiential Marketing
- Conversational Marketing
- AI Marketing
- Generative Engine Optimization
- Agentic Marketing
- Creator Economy
- Social Commerce
- Account-Based Marketing
- Lifecycle Marketing
- Neuromarketing
- and hundreds of emerging concepts.
But there is a fundamental problem:
We don't have a shared map.
The marketing ecosystem is fragmented across agencies, platforms, academic literature, SaaS products, consultants, creators, and constantly evolving AI terminology.
New concepts appear every month.
Old concepts merge.
Some disappear.
Others are simply renamed.
Searching for a marketing strategy often feels less like navigating a map and more like navigating an exploding universe.
So I asked a simple question:
Can we build a living taxonomy of marketing?
Marketing Taxonomy AI
Marketing Taxonomy AI is an open-source attempt to create a structured, evolving classification system for modern marketing.
The current taxonomy organizes 228 marketing types across multiple dimensions and evolutionary tiers.
Instead of treating marketing as a flat list, the project attempts to answer deeper questions:
What is this marketing concept?
Where does it belong?
What does it connect to?
What technologies enable it?
What business models does it support?
Is it established, specialized, or emerging?
This turns marketing from a dictionary into a knowledge system.
From Taxonomy to Marketing Knowledge Graph
A traditional taxonomy looks like a tree:
Marketing
├── Digital Marketing
│ ├── SEO
│ ├── Social Media Marketing
│ └── Content Marketing
│
├── Relationship Marketing
│ ├── CRM
│ └── Loyalty Marketing
│
└── Emerging Marketing
├── AI Marketing
└── Agentic Marketing
But reality is not a tree.
It's a network.
For example:
Agentic Marketing
│
├── uses → AI Agents
├── automates → Campaign Optimization
├── connects → Performance Marketing
├── connects → Personalization
├── operates through → Digital Channels
└── evolves from → Marketing Automation
This is why the long-term vision is bigger than a taxonomy.
Marketing Knowledge Graph
A system where marketing concepts become nodes and their relationships become the real information.
Marketing as an Operating System
Think about a company.
Its product is marketing.
Its pricing is marketing.
Its onboarding is marketing.
Its customer support is marketing.
Its packaging is marketing.
Its API is marketing.
Its founder's communication is marketing.
Its community is marketing.
Its reputation is marketing.
Even its technical architecture can become marketing.
A fast product communicates something.
A slow product communicates something else.
An open-source product communicates something.
A closed ecosystem communicates something else.
A $10 product communicates something.
A $10,000 product communicates something completely different.
Every choice sends a signal.
Marketing is therefore not simply the act of promoting something.
Marketing is the design of perception, meaning, relationships, attention, and value exchange.
And Then AI Changes Everything
The arrival of generative AI changes the problem dramatically.
We are no longer building marketing systems that only help humans create campaigns.
We're moving toward systems that can:
- understand audiences
- generate content
- analyze campaigns
- discover patterns
- personalize experiences
- optimize messaging
- coordinate channels
- run experiments
- and eventually operate autonomous marketing workflows.
This creates a new question:
How do AI agents understand the marketing universe?
An LLM can generate a marketing strategy.
But generation isn't enough.
An intelligent system needs a structured representation of the domain.
It needs to know that:
SEO
↓
Search Visibility
↓
Organic Acquisition
↓
Digital Marketing
while simultaneously understanding that:
SEO
↔ Content Marketing
↔ Search Intent
↔ Technical SEO
↔ Generative Search
↔ AI Search
The future of Marketing AI may therefore depend not only on bigger models.
It may depend on better representations of the marketing world.
From Search to Reasoning
Imagine asking an AI:
"We are a B2B SaaS company entering a new market. We have limited budget, strong technical expertise, and an existing developer community. What marketing strategies should we consider?"
A conventional AI might generate a list.
A taxonomy-aware AI could reason across a structured space:
Business Model
↓
B2B SaaS
↓
Audience
↓
Developers
↓
Community
↓
Content + Developer Marketing
↓
Organic Acquisition
↓
Product-Led Growth
↓
Technical Authority
Now the system isn't simply generating ideas.
It is navigating a knowledge space.
That's a much more interesting problem.
A Living Taxonomy
Marketing doesn't stop evolving.
That's why the project separates concepts into evolutionary levels:
Core
Established marketing practices.
Extended
Specialized and increasingly sophisticated approaches.
Emerging
New concepts emerging from AI, new platforms, new consumer behavior, and new business models.
But even this is not enough.
A serious taxonomy should also understand:
Verified
Merged
Renamed
Deprecated
Emerging
Experimental
Because knowledge evolves.
A taxonomy that never changes eventually becomes obsolete.
Marketing Taxonomy AI is designed to be a living system.
The Bigger Vision
The ultimate goal isn't to create another marketing website.
It's to build an open semantic infrastructure for marketing.
Imagine a future where developers can query:
/api/marketing-types
/api/search?q=agentic+marketing
/api/related/seo
/api/emerging
/api/compare
And AI systems can use the same knowledge layer to classify strategies, discover relationships, recommend approaches, and reason about new marketing concepts.
That creates a possible stack:
AI Agents
│
▼
Marketing Intelligence
│
▼
Marketing Knowledge Graph
│
▼
Marketing Taxonomy
│
▼
Real-world Marketing Signals
The taxonomy becomes the semantic layer between marketing reality and machine intelligence.
Why Open Source?
Because no single company owns the definition of marketing.
Marketing belongs to everyone who builds, sells, creates, researches, communicates, or interacts with value.
An open taxonomy can evolve through:
- community contributions
- academic research
- industry feedback
- real-world case studies
- new technologies
- emerging terminology
- AI-assisted discovery
The goal isn't to declare:
"This is the final definition of marketing."
The goal is to create a system capable of continually asking:
"What has marketing become?"
Everything Is Marketing
This is the philosophical layer behind the project.
Marketing isn't merely what happens after a product is built.
Marketing begins when an idea enters someone's mind.
A product is a promise.
A brand is a memory.
A user experience is a conversation.
A community is a relationship.
A price is a signal.
A distribution channel is a statement about accessibility.
A technology is a statement about possibility.
A company is a narrative expressed through decisions.
And every interaction modifies that narrative.
So perhaps the deepest definition of marketing isn't:
"How do we sell this?"
It's:
"How does this become meaningful to someone?"
And once you look at the world through that lens, the boundary between product, technology, culture, communication, and marketing starts to disappear.
The Question
We are entering an era where AI agents may become participants in marketing ecosystems rather than merely tools used by marketers.
They will discover audiences.
Create narratives.
Test hypotheses.
Coordinate channels.
Adapt strategies.
And perhaps eventually invent entirely new forms of marketing that don't have names yet.
If that happens, we will need something more fundamental than another marketing tool.
We will need a map.
That's what Marketing Taxonomy AI is trying to build.
Not the final map.
The first draft of a living one.
🔗 Explore the project:
https://github.com/modarresi1913/marketing-taxonomy-ai
And perhaps the simplest way to summarize the entire idea is:
**Everything Is Marketing.
And Marketing Is Everything.**
The interesting question is no longer whether something is marketing.
The interesting question is:
What kind of marketing is it becoming?
created by Seyed Alireza Alhosseini Almodarresieh
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