[nostrademons]

I've heard marketing used with this definition. It's actually really common - most marketing textbooks and classes will start from the premise that the goal of marketing is to identify a market and better serve it, and then work forward from it.

That said - I don't think marketing is a good goal for a startup, for the reasons enumerated here [1]. Basically, you can visualize the roles in a company like this:

                Concrete   |   Abstract
   -----------------------------------------
   Tech      | Programming |  Architecture
   Customers |   Sales     |   Marketing
   Employees |  Managers   |     HR
  

And in a startup, you don't want anything to be abstract, because there's too much room for error just getting the concrete stuff right. Everything in the right-hand column belongs in a big company, with millions of users and thousands of employees, because they deal with emergent phenomena that happens when you're huge. If you're thinking in those terms you'll get crushed by the big companies that actually do have all those resources, so startups need to focus on small niches that can grow.

[1] https://genius.com/Jessica-livingston-why-startups-need-to-f...