Agile Marketing Resource

I hate to be pedantic, but it seems to me that process and method are two related, butfundamentallydifferent things. Process is a series of actions or steps taken to achieve an end. Method is aparticular procedure for accomplishing or approaching the actions or steps of a process.

Which brings us to agile marketing methods and how they enable business and marketing adaptation. To adapt is not just to change, but to change successfully for the better. An adaptation is an improvement. We have another word for changes that are not successful failure! To be agile is to be excellent at adaptation.

If youre not doing something different, youre not doing anything.

~ Sam Phillips - Founder of Sun Studios and Sun Records

The notion of adaptive brand marketing gained a fair amount of traction several years ago after Forrester published a research paper in 2009 called Adaptive Brand Marketing . In 2010 the concept was a key component of marketing presentation from Delloite consulting , among many others. More recently the concept of agile marketing , the application of agile software development principles and methods to the practice of marketing particularly but not exclusively by any means to marketing communications, has enjoyed rising popularity of late.

The idea of adaptive marketing is both simple and obvious Brands must adapt to survive and thrive even in the best of times. In more challenging and quickly changing conditions the ability to adapt rapidly (agility) more or less equates with success. Brands that fail to adjust appropriately and respond well to changes in the marketplace lose value. Brands that are agile in their ongoing process of adaptation will tend to gain value.

Adaptive marketing is an iterative process of continuous cycles of change, measurement/assessment and adjustment. The truth is that it has always been this way, its just that the cycle times today need to be faster and faster to keep pace with the rate of real change taking place. What has become known as agile marketing is a best-practice set of defined methods that are designed to further the process of marketing adaptation. In order to adapt and respond to changes agility is required. Indeed, in the realm of business, while it may be possible to adapt slowly and clumsily, doing so with speed and agility is obviously preferred.

Id like to suggest that what has come to be known as agile marketing is a methodology that supports the more general process of adaptive marketin g. The goal of adaptive marketing (Yes, I am a master at stating the obvious) is to adapt, to respond to change in a robust and successful manner across all facets of the enterprise. Agile marketing methods enable adaptation because they are in their essence an iterative methodology with quick cycles (sprints) of building, deploying, measuring and adjusting programs, content, messaging, tone, audience, etc.

Frankly the currency of agile methodology at large (volume of conversation and interest) continues to rise rapidly. Agility in business is a hot topic; agile leadership, agile management, agile branding, agile financial reporting I think you must have noticed this too. And rightly sobecausebeing agile at responding to change is the key skill that enables adaptation. Agile customer service , agile support and maintenance , agile channel empowerment, and agile sales management are all sure to be equally prevalent in relatively short order.

In many ways agile marketing an unfortunate nomenclature for a formal method of managing the process of adaptation. Agile is an adjective that means to be nimble, but when we talk about agile marketing methods were really using it as a noun and this duality has been the source of no small amount of confusion in the press and among those with an interest in new methods and practices for improved marketing.

Lets face it, its getting harder to compete and times are tough for many (most?) businesses. Competitive pressures are enormous and the rate of change even in formerly complacent and fairly static business categories is enough to make your head spin. Everyone needs to adapt as the landscape and environment change. Which is why traditional marketing plans have short useful lives and have increasingly failed to keep pace with customers, competitors and significant (though sometimes subtle) changes in markets and the conversations that take place in and about them. Well practiced agile marketing methods address this problem by formally building rapid iteration and adjustment directly into the marketing process.

The truth is that marketing plans are not dead, as some agile marketing pundits have proclaimed. There still exist overarching competitive strategies, specific objectives and goals, but due to the rapid rate of change and the requirement for faster and more adept response it is the specificity of marketing plans that has been affected, notably in the realm of digital marketing. It simply no longer makes sense to thoroughly map out each and every single campaign, project and initiativeinexcruciatingdetail for a year or even six months in advance because what will be required (specifically) for success even three months from now is just not very clear or even known. Instead budgets now need to be allocated to theachievementof broadly defined high level strategic objectives and goals without much in the way of specific programmaticdetail that ofnecessitywill have to be figured out on-the-fly, often in response to small experiments that are designed to learn for the express purpose of adaptation.Agilemarketingmethodology is extremely well suited to accomplishing this task.

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