Agile marketing?

Agile business

Few days ago, 2 people entered my office with an idea for a business. They need everything from a logo to website. Within 1 month their business will be online, we have agreed. As we will go along, we will adapt the strategy and materials needed by what we learn in the process. Yes, this may be considered agile.

As a marketing agency that supports small and medium sized businesses, we must be agile. Perhaps too often, we jump between planning and execution (and back) in 1 day. Learning new tricks and implementing them as we work. Changing things daily based on our experience.

But is there agile marketing?

As we can learn about agile marketing in this article by Tanya Candia, 

"By engaging customers early on, accelerated design and review cycles allow you to understand what works for the customer before time and effort are spent on fully developing and implementing product features."

Sure, it is called market test. And we did it 30 years ago.

Today it is just done faster by using internet as research tool. Further, Tanya explains that 

"...four key aspects of agile marketing are ... flexibility ... cost-effectivness ... learning environment ... transparency."

Sure, but which business function is not suppose to be like this in modern world?

I expect this in any marketing unit of any company.

In corporate world, agile marketing is suppose to

"Figure out which are the most important things you need to do

• outsource certain functions
• find talent
• be ready and willing to make changes"

Certainly, since agile marketing is nothing else but marketing, just done in faster (sometimes daily) cycles. Actually, there is no agile marketing. Just marketing done in agile ways.

Buzz words make us look unprofessional

There are already too many buzz words that just make our profession look as cosmetics. The same as it was with web 2.0 which technically never existed since there was no version 1.0. And there will never be a version 2.5 or 3.0.

And for the same reasons, doctors or any other serious scientists will never give proper respect to marketing. While we invent new buzz words without proper definitions, other sciences are really inventing new stuff.

This is why we will not sell seminars entitled Agile marketing. Even though we are the most agile marketing agency we know of. :)