Agile as a Marketing tool?

I’ve often told friends that most marketing tasks are pretty easy because they aren’t that different from engineering tasks.  Hell, they’re not that different from knowing how to get things done, no matter what the discipline.  Most of it is application of common sense, coming up with a plan, communicating clearly, managing project with lots of moving parts, keeping track of deliverables from individuals responsible for subprojects, testing hypotheses and making improvements… am I building a marketing campaign or coding a new product feature?  The Force is the Force, whether you’re on the Light Side or the Dark Side, some things don’t change.

Now the marriage of marketing and engineering may be getting even more formal.  A good friend sent me this link from Marketbright pointing out that marketing really has no methodology to speak of.  Sales has their selling cycles and methodologies that move prospects through a pipeline from lead to sale.  Engineering has their agile and their waterfall development techniques to turn customer requirements into released product features.  Marketing has… uh… the 4P’s?  Generally it’s whatever worked last time, with modifications to see if you can make it better.  It’s frontier land.  It’s constantly changing.  You succeed by applying engineering principles for problem solving and figuring it out.  RTFM?  There’s no M that you can F-ing R!

So what if you could apply the Agile manifesto development processes – 6 week sprints with daily sprint meetings, welcoming changing requirements and mid-course corrections, closely tracking commitments and metrics, working lockstep with customers, finding efficiencies — to the marketing team?  Would it work?  How very, very interesting.

I can see objections and problems immediately, but the objections I come up with seem like they already exist in the development world and they’ve figured it out, right?  Things like the amount of external dependencies usually involved in getting projects done.  I think about projects like “create a flash video that showcases our product line.”  Most external agencies couldn’t easily handle an agile marketing setup. They bid for the work, if we’re lucky they have a project manager and a traffic cop, they set up review cycles, and x weeks later we have the deliverable. For them, mid-course corrections = extra fees, scope creep, change orders, etc.  However, if you’re talking internal “agencies” doing the work instead of external vendors, I could see the iterative process working.  Or if you had an agency on retainer (you guarantee them $X/month worth of spending with them, they guarantee resources set aside to help you.)  Hmmm.  It could work.

Likewise, it’s hard to imagine a sales time wanting to spend significant time stopping to help out a marketing team.  Sales teams want marketing to help them, but they don’t get paid to help marketing figure out what sales tools to create… they get paid to sell, sell, sell.  And there’s a fundamental distrust between the bounty hunters of sales and the dark jedi of marketing.  As Geoffrey James at The Sales Machine loves to say, “The operative behavior for marketing groups is to find a parade and get out in front of it.” Often sales departments don’t think anything marketing does results in revenue, they claim marketing is just trying to take credit for their hard work.  However, if sales teams feel marketing doesn’t communicate with sales enough and doesn’t really know what’s going on… a regular agile-style meeting with them might help with.  If sales bought into it, then you’ve effectively got customer buy-in and can get the feedback loop you need to remain nimble via the agile process.

I want this to work.   I’ll definitely be following the Marketbright experiment — and any others I hear about — with great interest.