Agile Marketing

I am doing some work at the moment for a client who is trying to measure innovation inside their company.

Depending on your type of company, this can be easy or hard. And there are a lot of resources available to help - most notably this government report commissioned last year to look at innovation in the US economy (I link to it only because it was written by of a bunch of CEO's and business leaders, not just academics, which means it has a nice practical focus).

A recent post by Gareth over at Brand New also got me thinking about innovation in Marketing. He talks about an 'option investor' approach - you dabble in a range of different activities and see what gains traction. The activity range is like your innovation sand-box. And in Marketing this can contain a lot of toys - new media, old media, social media, digital whatever. Innovation comes from trying/testing a range of things rather than just thinking and planning the 'one big thing'.

This kind of idea also matches closely with a theme in technology startups - where many people advise you to build, test, re-build, test, rebuild, etc. A very trial-and-use focused way to develop. It actually has a name - Agile Development.

So what about Agile Marketing - a very innovation, test and trial Marketing effort rather than thinking and planning one big thing? Makes sense.

Looks like I am not the first person to coin the phrase. Back in 2006 Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath actually blogged about the exact same idea - again borrowing from the software development world.

I think it's a really interesting way to think about Marketing in today's world. Throw away the 100 page plan and just concentrate on executing in phases that have clear goals and at least some way of measuring success. The key is keeping goals manageable and constantly tweaking your approach.

And don't be afraid to just try things! I always cringe when I see my ex employers web-site - it still has a reference to Netscape Navigator and IE4 on the splash page. It doesn't take 2 years to change a website!

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