The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 1Challenges Facing Marketers Today

You should never view your challenges as a disadvantage. Instead, it's important for you to understand that your experience facing and overcoming adversity is actually one of your biggest advantages.

—Michelle Obama, former First Lady of the United States

It took 110 years for the telephone to be adopted by 1 billion users. It took 49 years for television to be adopted by 1 billion users, 22 years for mobile devices, 14 years for the Internet, and 8 years for Facebook.

It took one year for the Internet of Things (IOT) to reach 1 billion devices.¹

These new technologies and the accelerating rate of technological change present new opportunities to reach customers. Marketing must adapt.

According to the folks at Moz, an inbound marketing and search engine optimization firm,² Google releases between 5 and 35 major changes, and hundreds of minor ones, to its search algorithm each year. Its MozCast tool, shown in Figure 1.1, shows the turbulence in Google's ranking algorithm over time.

Figure 1.1 Moz's MozCast tool, image courtesy of Moz, Inc.

Source: Moz, Inc.

Google's own data (which Google stopped sharing in 2018) indicate that Google makes, in fact, more than 5,000 changes, major and minor, every year. That's 14 changes per day. No marketing plan can keep up with that pace of change.

In 2017 and 2018, marketers sprinkled artificial ...