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A good Agile marketing definition can be hard to come by. The tough part is that it’s a combination of two very easily misunderstood words: “Agile” and “marketing.” For those who haven’t spent a lot of time exploring its nuances, Agile comes to mean merely fast or hyper-productive. Marketers who prowl the internet for a couple of hours and think they’re up to speed on all Agile has to offer often fall into this trap. If you hear someone say something like, “Why can’t you drop everything and start on this brilliant idea? I thought you were agile now,” they’ve got the first part of this definition wrong. Then we’ve got the word “marketing,” which can trip up long-time agilest just as badly as “Agile” can confuse marketers.
So what is agile marketing, really? Quick Takeaways: Agile is not limited to software development. Agile doesn’t sacrifice planning and stability for the sake of speed. Agile Marketing puts decision making in the hands of marketers, achieving strategic business objectives as well as benefiting customers. Agile Marketing aims to do away with the limitations of traditional marketing. Many coaches and trainers from the software world underestimate the complexity of modern marketing, and think their usual approaches will do the trick. But marketing is a unique beast…or maybe a unicorn. Either way it’s not like software. An Agile coach leading the marketing transformation inside IBM recently told me as much, calling marketing work “utterly different” from the development work he had previously worked to transform.
It’s complicated in its own special way,” he said. Misunderstandings abound on both sides, so let’s clear the air and create a nice solid Agile marketing definition. What Agile Marketing is NOT It’s often easiest to start a definition by clarifying what something is NOT, so let’s see where that can get us. negative agile marketing definition Agile Marketing is Not Software Development We’ve already touched on the first item in this list: Agile marketing isn’t a carbon copy of Agile software development. It follows similar values and principles, but even a cursory glance at the manifestos from these two movements will show distinctions.
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