The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 25The Future of Agile Marketing

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

—Eleanor Roosevelt, former First Lady of the United States

What is the future of Agile marketing? What will it take to move Agile marketing further into the mainstream, to where it becomes the dominant approach to marketing, just as it has become the dominant approach to software development?

Expanding the Ecosystem

I began my marketing career in the early 1990s, about the same time that Geoffrey Moore published his seminal book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. This book greatly influenced my thinking about how new products or concepts get adopted by mainstream customers.

In particular, Moore identified a key gap between what marketers promise and what the customer expects or needs in realizing the benefits of a product or service. He identified four levels of product completeness:

1. The generic product as provided by the vendor
2. The expected product, which includes the minimum set of capabilities, not all provided by the vendor, to make the product work
3. The augmented product, which goes beyond the minimum set of capabilities to provide augmented capabilities that the customer wants or needs
4. The potential product, which includes everything for the customer to realize the potential of the product

Agile marketing is, at the time of this writing, somewhere between a generic product and an expected product. It has ...