2014: The Year Agile Marketing Takes Off

By Scott Brinker  

If you had to summarize all the major IT and marketing trends of 2013 into just six words, you could simply say, "There were a lot of changes." And the five-word prediction for 2014? "There will be even more."

"Change is the only constant" may sound like a fortune cookie — with apologies to Heraclitus — but it accurately describes the state of digital business today. And in a study by Forrester Research earlier this year, 96 percent of marketing leaders agreed that the pace of change in technology and marketing will only continue to accelerate.

This is why one of the most interesting trends from 2013 — and one that is poised to grow explosively in 2014 — is the adoption of agile management in the marketing department.

Everyone agrees that marketing needs to be agile today, at least in the sense of the adjective: nimble, able to move quickly and easily. But agile marketing isn't an aspiration. It's actually a relatively well-defined management methodology that began in software development circles back in the 1990s and has recently been adapted to serve the needs of marketers. 

Principles of Agile Management
The essence of agile management is straightforward and rests on three main ideas:
First, instead of defining rigid and detailed quarterly or yearly plans, agile handles planning in a more iterative and adaptive manner. Agile breaks down work into bite-sized "sprints" that last for one to four weeks each. At the start of each sprint, there's an opportunity for management to adjust priorities based on results from the previous sprints and external changes in the market. There can still be an overarching yearly plan — really, more of a vision — but how that plan is achieved can be determined in a more emergent fashion.

The agile marketing cycle
 
Second, agile enables transparency. Everyone can see what is planned for the current sprint, what's complete, what's in progress and who's working on it, as well as the backlog of priorities — what is queued up to be tackled in subsequent sprints. "Everyone" can mean everyone on the team, everyone in the marketing department, or in many cases, everyone in the company who is interested in marketing's initiatives. Among other benefits, this transparency gives people visibility into the trade-offs of incorporating new requests into marketing's to-do list.

Third, agile emphasizes small, cross-functional teams. Teams are often composed of individuals who cross traditional organizational silos and focus on the collective work of the team as much as their own speciality. Daily stand-up meetings among the team keep them in sync and quickly identify any bottlenecks or impediments. Agile empowers the people on the front-line to influence sprint planning, make commitments to tasks that they will own, and take significant liberty with how they accomplish them. Agile balances top-down vision with bottom-up innovation and responsiveness to unexpected problems and opportunities. 

A Tipping Point and the Year Ahead
The mechanics of agile management are relatively simple. But truly embracing agile can be challenging, especially in organizations where big, long-term, top-down planning has been the primary way in which things worked. It's often a fairly significant shift in management philosophy: acknowledging that we can't plan everything in advance and instead, actively pursue emergent strategies and implementations.

It's because of the difficulty of evolving organizational culture that — for a while — agile marketing practices were isolated to a relatively small group of early adopters. A couple of years ago, many of the people to whom I mentioned agile marketing would reply, "Sounds interesting, but that would never work at my company."

But 2013 was a tipping point. The number of marketers I met at conferences who had started to experiment with agile — or were considering experimenting with it — increased by an order of magnitude. Hundreds of marketers have joined Agile Marketing meet-ups in San Francisco and Boston. More events such as MarketingProfs B2B Forum, the Marketo Summit and Eloqua Experience featured agile marketing sessions. At the Gilbane Conference earlier this month, more than 80 percent of the audience in a session I ran were familiar with agile marketing.

The reason for this blossoming of agile marketing is that the pace of change has become so rapid that the old way of managing marketing is clearly not working. Instead of "that would never work at my company," I'm hearing a lot more people say, "that might help with some of our biggest problems."

Collectively, as an industry, we're gaining momentum behind agile methods in the marketing department. My bet is that 2014 will be a really big year for agile marketing. I hope it is for you.

Title image courtesy of Matthew Benoit (Shutterstock)

About the Author

Scott Brinker is the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive. You can connect with him on Twitter as @chiefmartec.

Schmooze or Lose: How the Lost Art of Negotiation Led to a Shutdown

By Jack and Suzy Welch

With all the finger-pointing and name-calling going on in Washington these days, it’s hard to believe a delegation of kindergarten teachers from Dubuque hasn’t arrived to put an end to the nonsense. But no. The blame game goes on and on and the government stays shuttered.

And meanwhile, the people watching the story play out – and, we would say, especially leaders in business – might be missing the most important lesson of it all.

You have to schmooze.

Clarification: You have to schmooze early and often. You can’t suddenly burst out of your office to build relationships when you hear rumbles of trouble from down below, and it’s certainly too late by the time a crisis flares. No, schmoozing has to be what you do all the time as a leader; it has to be a massive part of your job. Walking around, having a coffee, sitting and listening, getting real, letting people get real with you. Showing who you are, what you care about, exposing your hopes and dreams and values. Asking people the same about themselves.

Building — in two big fat words — trust and transparency.

And look, we’re not talking about the standard, ho-ho-ho kind of social schmoozing you do with your customers and your team and your boss. That’s easy. That’s like President Obama schmoozing with Nancy Pelosi, or John Boehner schmoozing with Eric Cantor.

Leaders have to do something harder and more essential; something that can feel awkward at first. You have to schmooze with your known “adversaries” too, say, for instance, your union, or the group of employees who hate your new strategy and want the old one back. The resistors that exist in every organization. The perennial naysayers. Smart and annoying. Them.

Because if you don’t schmooze with friend and foe alike as a leader, unpleasant or wildly inefficient as it may seem, one day a crisis will come and, without thriving relationships and ongoing dialogue, it will shut you down, be it in the grand corridors of Capitol Hill or over in the three cramped rooms you call headquarters.

Here’s an example of what we mean. Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, GE was plagued by strikes. That changed in the ‘80s when the senior team made it a priority to meet with the unions at every possible opportunity. The idea was to create constant, candid dialogue about values and goals, treating union leaders with the dignity and respect they deserved, whether it was at the plant or national level.
 

There wasn’t a strike at GE for 21 years. Did that mean management and labor suddenly started to see eye-to-eye? Hardly. But where there had been suspicion and wariness, there now was transparency and trust. No more “first dates” every three years, sitting grimly across from each other at the bargaining table. Schmoozing had smoothed the way.

Now, we’re not Luddites. We love dashing off an email and texting can’t be beat for efficiency. Y call Sally abt her promotion when u can just send a :-) ?

But the day Sally has a bone to pick with you about a new initiative or a promotion she didn’t get – and she’s ready to start building a coalition around her position – a :-) isn’t going to cut it. She needs to have seen you smile in person, and heard your voice and mind – and you need to have seen and heard and known her too.

People will always have legitimate differences. What’s happening in Washington right now is, underneath it all, based on them. But for leaders, the building of transparency and trust is what makes those differences negotiable.

It turns foes into friends with different opinions.

Jack Welch is Founder and Distinguished Professor at the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Through its executive education and Welch Way management training programs, the Jack Welch Management Institute provides students and organizations with the proven methodologies, immediately actionable practices, and respected credentials needed to win in the most demanding global business environments.

Suzy Welch is a best-selling author, popular television commentator, and noted business journalist. Her New York Times bestselling book, 10-10-10: A Life Transforming Idea, presents a powerful decision-making strategy for success at work and in parenting, love and friendship. Together with her husband Jack Welch, Suzy is also co-author of the #1 international bestseller Winning, and its companion volume, Winning: The Answers. Since 2005, they have written business columns for several publications, including Business Week magazine, Thomson Reuters digital platforms, Fortune magazine, and the New York Times syndicate.
 

Posted by:Jack Welch