What Is a Marketing World Model?

Subtitle: Entities, beliefs, clocks, and the art of building worlds you can run — starting with the marketer that is you.

“We think we design messages. Often we only design moods — until we specify what changes, for whom, and when.”
— adapted from Herbert A. Simon

Opening provocation¶

Marketing fails in two opposite ways: vague story (no mechanism) and narrow metric (mechanism without meaning). A marketing world model is the middle path: a computable story about who attends, what they believe, how messages move, and what you measure.

In AINS-M6001, the smallest honest world is your own influence system: attention, credibility, clarity, and effort — before you pretend to model “the market.”

1. A marketing world model in four parts¶

Entities — audiences, messages, channels, assets (including you as marketer).
Properties — attention stocks, trust, message vectors, costs.
Rules — how signals propagate, how trust updates, how effort maps to reach.
A clock — tick size (day, week, campaign flight).

If the skeleton is vague, “insights” are theater.

Key concepts

Marketing world model: explicit representation of influence dynamics over time.
State: snapshot of all relevant properties at a tick.
Dynamics: how state evolves under rules (deterministic, stochastic, or mixed).

2. Ontology: what exists in this world?¶

Ontology answers: what kinds of things are real here?

2.1 Design choice, not discovery¶

You choose fidelity vs parsimony vs computability. A personal marketing ontology might include Marketer, AudienceSlice, Message, ChannelEffort. It might omit Mood in v1 until rules justify it.

2.2 Boundaries¶

Outside the boundary: macro trends, platform algorithm details, luck. You may treat them as shocks or constants — but say which.

Key concepts

Ontology: catalog of first-class types and relationships.
Exogenous vs endogenous: inputs vs computed quantities inside the boundary.

3. Properties: where meaning becomes measurement¶

Examples for Marketer in v1:

attention_hours_day — allocable hours for marketing work
credibility — stock of believed competence (0–1 or 0–100)
message_clarity — how tight your core promise is to a defined niche
weekly_content_units — throughput of posts, emails, pages

4. Rules: what updates when the clock ticks?¶

Illustrative rule families:

Reach: increasing function of attention × credibility × clarity (with diminishing returns).
Trust: increases with consistent proof; decreases with broken promises or hype.
Fatigue: repeated identical messages reduce marginal attention capture.

5. What this course will not do¶

Replace ethics with optimization.
Promise viral formulas.
Hide assumptions inside “brand voice.”

6. Bridge to the notebook¶

01_first_marketing_world.ipynb implements a minimal Marketer and a toy reach rule so you can run something on day one. Your job is to own the ontology choices and list what is missing.

Lecture checklist¶

I can name my entities and why each is first-class.
I can point to one exogenous assumption I am making.
I can describe one thing my v1 model cannot represent yet.