The Agile Marketer

Conclusion: The Steward of Customer Experience

Throughout this book, I've presented stories about companies that are working hard to modernize and about companies that are dramatically disrupting established business models. They share a common denominator: the view that their communities (both internal and external) are a resource—in fact, the critical resource—that must be leveraged to sustain competitive advantage. We've explored the role that Agile can play in facilitating community engagement to support both innovation and marketing. Agile not only harnesses input from the community, but it also provides a better approach to developing the integrated marketing platform that marketers will need to better understand and engage with the community.

As a discipline shared by the innovation and marketing sides, Agile is also strengthening C-suite relationships where it gains a foothold, even where traditional strategy practices remain in place. And that's a good thing: Every member of the C-suite has a vested interest in an integrated marketing platform that supports his or her goals. The marketer's ability to deliver this platform as a service to his or her colleagues (MaaS) is a long-term, but nonetheless worthwhile, goal that will uniquely position marketers to be the stewards of customer experience—and thus turn Peter Drucker's vision into reality.

How should companies be thinking about customer experience in the larger sense?

Oracle is one of those big companies that is fighting ...