I ran across an interesting blog post "The Crisis in Marketing" by Erik Bower from MarketBright where he talks about current Marketing methodologies not keeping pace with the pressures in today’s business environments: volatile markets, pressure to prove marketing's impact on sales pipeline, reduced budgets and headcounts, new tactics such as social media, etc.
Bower takes a page from the shift in software development methodologies (agile development replacing waterfall model, etc over the last years) and applies it to marketing. This approach replaces the static, long timeframe planning approach common in most marketing departments today with an agile approach that emphasizes team collaboration over process, quick iterative adjustments to changes over plan adherence.
With agile marketing, quarterly plans shrink to six week sprints, daily reviews of program performance (similar to the daily build concept in software development) replace quarterly reviews, quick mid-course corrections based on testing and real-time market feedback are encouraged, and project plans allow for unforeseen issues and last minute additions.
This approach helps marketing not only remain relevant in today’s organizations but provide visibility into the value it provides to the company, aligning with the needs of the sales organization, and reducing the cost of marketing while increasing performance (http://bit.ly/5kVZzm). How are you managing marketing in your organization?
