Hacking Marketing

22Bimodal MarketingBalancing Innovation and Scalability

As our marketing innovation gains momentum, we should take a moment to celebrate. It's a great feeling to be sailing into the future with the digital wind at your back.

But that moment is quickly followed by the realization of another challenge: scalability.

It's one thing for an idea to work on a small scale, where the person or people who invented it are able to nurture it carefully. They're immersed in the concept and understand how it works better than anyone. They can tinker with the concept, and they usually focus on feasibility—demonstrating that the idea can work—more than repeatability or consistency.

Scaling up those ideas—adopting them more widely or deploying them more frequently throughout marketing—is a different matter entirely. Sometimes scaling marketing is simply a matter of reach: distributing communications or experiences to a larger audience. But it can also require greater participation inside the company: more people who must understand the concept and the role they play in its execution. Repeatability and consistency become very important.

Marketing faces an additional scalability challenge today, resulting from the enormous variety of touchpoints under marketing's umbrella. Instead of a small number of programs that are simply being scaled by growing their external reach and internal participation, marketing now manages an increasing diversity of programs overall, of many sizes and flavors. And, ...