The Six Markets Most Marketing Completely Ignores
And why fixing that is the most strategic thing you can do this quarter.
Modern marketing has quietly become obsessed with output. We measure impressions, track click-through rates, celebrate follower counts, and ship content at a pace that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. AI has turbocharged all of it. But somewhere in the rush to produce more, faster, we’ve lost sight of something foundational: relationships.
Philip Kotler’s updated definition of marketing – “the process by which companies engage customers, build strong customer relationships and create customer value in order to capture value from customers in return” – centres three words: engage, relationships, and value. Simple words. Increasingly neglected ones.
One of the most powerful and underused frameworks for fixing that neglect is the six markets model. It maps every stakeholder group a business needs to actively manage – and most organisations are only paying attention to one of them.
Here are all six, including the five that tend to get forgotten.
1. Customer Markets
This is the one everyone focuses on. Acquisition, retention, loyalty programmes, customer experience – these sit firmly on most marketing plans. If your business has any marketing function at all, you are almost certainly investing here.
The problem is not that organisations focus on customer markets. It is that they focus only on customer markets, leaving the other five to fend for themselves.
2. Internal Markets
Your people are a market. And if your team does not believe in the brand, understand its direction, or feel connected to the strategy, no amount of external campaigning will compensate.
Internal relationships determine whether strategy survives contact with reality. A beautifully crafted brand positioning means very little if the people delivering it day-to-day cannot articulate it, do not believe it, or are actively working around it. Internal alignment is not an HR responsibility that marketing can safely ignore – it is a commercial prerequisite.
Ask yourself honestly: does your team know what the brand stands for? Do they understand why this quarter’s priorities were chosen? Can they explain the strategy to a colleague in plain language?
If the answer is uncertain, this is your highest-leverage relationship to invest in first.
3. Referral Markets
Word-of-mouth has always been powerful, but the referral market is broader than happy customers recommending you to friends. It includes professional partnerships, reciprocal alliances, industry connectors, and non-customer advocates who can drive real revenue – without any additional media spend.
These relationships tend to get deprioritised because they do not produce an immediate spike in dashboard metrics. A referral partnership formalised this quarter might not show up as attributed revenue for months. But when it does, the economics are usually far better than anything you paid for.
The question to ask: who in your industry is already talking to the people you want to reach, and what would it take to build a genuine relationship with them?
4. Supplier and Alliance Markets
Most marketers treat supplier relationships as transactional – a rate card, a contract, a delivery deadline. But when timelines compress or costs rise (and they will), the businesses that have invested in genuine relationships with their suppliers and production partners have flexibility that transactional arrangements simply do not offer.
A supplier who considers you a genuine partner will find a way to make things work when things go sideways. One who sees you as just another client will not.
This applies equally to agency relationships, technology partners, and production vendors. The investment is not complicated – it is communication, transparency, and treating partners as stakeholders rather than line items.
5. Influence Markets
Influence markets include industry bodies, media, regulators, analysts, investors, and shareholders. These groups shape your operating environment long before a consumer ever sees an advertisement.
A regulator who understands your business and has experienced you as a credible, transparent partner is a fundamentally different relationship than one who only encounters you when something has gone wrong. A journalist who knows and respects your work will handle a difficult story differently than one who is encountering your brand for the first time under pressure.
These relationships compound over time. They are also the first to be sacrificed when a marketing team is stretched thin – which makes them both underinvested and disproportionately valuable when competitors are equally neglecting them.
6. Recruitment Markets
Whether or not HR owns the hiring process, the quality of people you can attract is a direct output of how your brand shows up to potential candidates. And in a tight talent market, that matters commercially.
Marketing has a natural role here – shaping employer brand, ensuring the organisation is visible and appealing in the right communities, and working closely with whoever owns talent acquisition. If your recruitment market relationship is weak, you are limiting your own ability to execute the strategy you are responsible for delivering.
How to implement the six markets model in your business
The six markets model is not academic theory. It is designed to drive commercial decisions – and it starts with an honest audit.
Map each of the six markets. List the key individuals or groups within each. Score the strength of each relationship on a scale of one to five. Then ask three questions for each one:
- How does this relationship increase value for the organisation?
- How does it reduce risk?
- What would a genuinely strong version of this relationship make possible?
If you cannot answer those questions clearly, the relationship is transactional rather than strategic.
Then pick one non-customer stakeholder group and deliberately invest in it over the next quarter. Assign ownership – because relationships that belong to everyone tend to belong to no one.
It will not produce an immediate spike in impressions. It will compound in ways that paid media cannot replicate.
As James Chen of WPR puts it: “AI will continue to compress the cost of execution. It will not compress the value of trust, access and influence.”
Content is getting cheaper to produce by the day. Relationship leverage is becoming the differentiator that separates marketers who run campaigns from those who build resilient, commercially effective organisations.
The six markets framework is a simple way to start.
For advice on how to implement the six markets model in your business, get in touch.
Inspired by James Chen’s article in NZ Marketing magazine, Issue 86 (March-May 2026).