Hacking Marketing

8The Origins of Agile Marketing

The quest for greater agility in marketing—and, more broadly, in business as a whole—is mostly driven by the digital dynamics of speed and adaptability, as introduced in Chapter 3.

The speed of digital enables us, potentially, to act and react much more quickly to new opportunities and threats, shifting circumstances, and market feedback. And digital adaptability allows us, potentially, to alter our content and services, with digital scale and precision, with relative ease—at least in comparison to the mechanics and economics of traditional marketing.

However, the word potentially in those two last sentences is the catch.

It's the digital environment and digital technology—primarily software—that offers us that potential. But buying a bunch of software and plugging into the Internet doesn't inherently give you those benefits. (I joke that marketing automation software doesn't mean you simply push a button and a robot automatically does all your marketing for you.) These are simply tools. How much benefit you extract from them depends on how you use them.

For most companies, the real constraints on harnessing the power of these tools aren't the technical details of how they're used. The big bottlenecks are usually the speed and adaptability of the management layer above that. Many existing processes and organizational structures are rooted in the way the predigital world worked. They're management memes from an era when speed and adaptability were ...