After learning about some of the fascinating efforts that
the “agile marketing group” are making to have a process corresponding to
“product development agility” over the last month, I find it’s a good time to
set down some possibly useful thoughts on the subject. These are thoughts from
the point of view of a computer industry analyst reasonably well versed in
software development and agile concepts in that area, and with a reasonable
theoretical and consulting acquaintance with marketing to businesses.
I call this a 40,000-foot view because I think that the
success of agility in product development should challenge marketers to rethink
their jobs fundamentally, not incrementally. However, it is all too easy to
take a 20,000-foot view as from an airplane, seeing the broad outlines of marketing
as it is today and picking and choosing those parts of product development
agility (like the notion of “simplicity”) that comfort rather than challenge
the marketer. With a 40,000-foot view, only the largest of mountains breaks up
the monotony of land or sea, and we avoid getting bogged down in details or
transitory marketing practices.
The aim of this view, therefore, is to think:
·
Long-term;
·
In terms of customer lifecycles;
·
Focusing on customer change rather than a
succession of static preferences.
I hope to end up asking how the agile marketer can steer
company products and services for the most effective “customer dance” with a
broad range of customers, and what kinds of agile practices drawn from
development can best serve them in this effort. But first, alas, definitions.
A Different Marketing Model
First, I would suggest that, as I noted in a previous piece,
all “customer dances” (ongoing interactions with a customer) can be thought of
as offering the company’s “worldview” to the customer to adopt or not, in
competition with other companies’ worldviews.
For example, a buyer of insurance is offered several alternative ways of
entering into a world of protection from nasty things that can happen to the
customer. Or, a buyer of video games is offered many ways of living in
alternate worlds where certain types of skills are trained for. If one thinks
of a typical adult customer’s day, it starts with products and worldviews
associated with home, then with worldviews that aid one at a particular type of
job, then worldviews associated either with entertainment or more home tasks.
I suggest that customers’ needs for worldviews can be
vaguely sorted into three categories:
1.
Learn.
There are psychic as well as physical rewards for people who learn. Moreover,
it is an open-ended process, one that need never end. Examples might be
education, hobbies, training, passions, and fantasies.
2.
Do.
This has been the traditional realm of much marketing, and has traditionally
been thought of as mostly involving survival, job, or family support needs,
ranging from buying food to mowing the lawn.
This is often true; but often there are psychic rewards for just
accomplishing something “well”.
3.
Interact. Pure Learn and Do are solitary activities;
pure Interact has no purpose other than connecting to other people. This
recognizes both the need for and psychic rewards for these connections. Things
like phones, email, meeting halls, and dates are, by and large, mostly for
Interaction.
It should be obvious that much of what is sold is a mixture
of all three; but it is frequently useful to ask which of the three
predominates. For example, a PC today is
typically used in the consumer market predominantly to Learn (the blogosphere
is an example) and secondarily to Interact, while in the business market it is
primarily used to Do.
The marketer therefore has two fundamental choices:
1.
Which worldview
– which mix of learn, do, and interact – should I associate my company (brand,
products, services) with? In other words, the choice is not merely one of
industry – if “marketing myopia” didn’t make that clear – but also of the way
the company would like the customer to think about the world (obviously, one
that will sell lots of stuff) – bearing in mind that the customer has things to
do and lots of alternatives, and so the time the customer spends in any one
company’s worldview is very limited.
2.
Where in the customer’s life should I begin my relationship with the customer,
and where should I end it? Let’s face it, babies don’t buy products by
themselves, and neither do the elderly in assisted living. The relationship with the customer must have
a beginning and an endpoint. Call this the relationship
lifecycle.
Coming to Different Agile Answers
Before we launch into suggested “best” choices, let’s pause
and think of ways that agile marketing might be said to be different from other
marketing approaches. If I had to give a
short answer, it would go something like this:
·
Agile marketing emphasizes frequent, two-way
conversations with the customer. In
other words, the company does not decide a worldview and relationship lifecycle
in isolation: It constantly evolves both
in partnership with its customers.
·
Agile marketing increases the company’s own
emphasis on learning, especially
compared to doing. That change does not force the company to adopt a worldview
that emphasizes learning more than before; but it does give the company
additional ability to implement a
worldview oriented more strongly towards customers’ “learn” needs. Thus, for
example, Amazon.com can learn customers’ book preferences and trade that for
increased sales by giving customers advance notice of publication of books they
are fond of.
·
Counterintuitively, an emphasis on iterative,
incremental new marketing and customer interactions leads agile marketers to a
more long-run view of the customer
relationship. Tighter bonds with customers lead naturally to greater efforts to
extend the relationship. That, in turn,
gives the company new capabilities for longer relationship lifecycles.
·
Finally, compared to previous marketing
approaches, agile marketing emphasizes more the idea that change is good. Mostly, this refers to changes in company marketing
practices, company attitudes towards customers, and changes made during
marketing projects.
Now let’s think selfishly about what a company wants, in
order to maximize revenues/profits in the long term. The company wants:
·
The most
possible (profitable) customers;
·
Over the longest
possible relationship lifecycle;
·
With the greatest
customer loyalty (here I mean not
just continuing to buy the same products, but also following the company into
new products/services).
Let me pause for just a moment and put that in terms of
worldviews and lifecycles. Here’s a grossly generalized Table:
Worldview Relationship Lifecycle
Learn Values trading info Very
long
Do Values quick solutions Short
Interact Values lots of interacters Medium-term
And so, agile marketing appears to improve a company’s
revenues/profit maximization in three ways:
1.
It lengthens
the company’s typical relationship lifecycle by emphasizing Learn customers
more.
2.
It increases
customer loyalty by both involving the customer more and providing
follow-on or related products/services more rapidly.
3.
It increases
the number of customers both by speeding company movement into related
markets and by decreasing customer disloyalty.
4.
It makes the company itself more able to change its target customers and therefore itself as
the environment changes in future – by helping to make the company culture
comfortable with change.
Two Personal Views: Addicts and Learning
I believe that agile marketing should also consider two
other long-term aspects of customer “needs,” because, in the long run, I see
traditional company strategies as sometimes harmful to companies’ long-term
success.
The first aspect is the company-strategy tendency to sell to
what I call the “addict” – someone who
is or becomes psychologically addicted to a type of product or service. Obviously, there are food addicts and
drink/drug addicts; but there are also shopping addicts, home-repair addicts, conversation
addicts, and even flying addicts. The characteristic of the addict is that he
or she is impelled to spend more on a particular product/service type than is
good for him/her – but that’s the type of customer that a company reflexively
wants. You want to buy? Buy more!
I would argue two things about the addict. First, in the long run, feeding addicts
shortens relationship lifecycles (the addict’s life goes down the tubes),
decreases other-customer loyalty (all I hear from you is buy, buy), and
decreases revenues from the customer (I’m in hock up to my eyeballs). Second,
the Learn customer is least likely to be an addict – both because the customer
himself/herself is most adaptable to the changing needs of the workplace, and
therefore more likely to have cash to spend, and because the customer may be
more “realistic”, and therefore more likely to recognize and avoid addiction.
Therefore, I conclude that marketing in general, and agile
marketing in particular, should consider the company’s present mix of addict
and non-addict, and shift towards fewer addicts, possibly by moving towards a
greater mix of Learn in its customers.
The second aspect of customer needs I think agile marketing should
consider, irrespective of addiction, is which of the three “types” of customer
would be best for the company, say, 10 years from now. We can point to plenty
of companies that emphasize Learn, like video-game companies, and plenty that
emphasize Interact, like the cell-phone and social-media companies, and definitely
plenty that continue to emphasize the Do customer.
I would argue that most consumer companies, at the least,
would benefit by increasing their
proportion of Learn customers. They appear to be least likely to be
addicts; they are least likely to get tired of or get a surfeit of the stuff
provided; they have the potential to offer very long relationship lifecycles; they
can provide a surprising amount of valuable information to the company along
with their money; and the newness of what you provide is generally more
exciting, while being “safe”. And since most B2B companies wind up providing
value-add to products and services that wind up in the hands of consumers,
they, too, should consider whether to improve their Learn customer value-add as
passed on by the intermediate business.
The Agile Marketer’s Job
Implicit in the above analysis is a fairly simple statement
of what should be the agile marketer’s general strategy:
Stretch all
dimensions of the customer’s worldview/lifecycle.
This means, specifically:
·
Try to make the customer see you as a larger
part of their life, by seeing you as in sync with their life and offering an
interesting way to approach more and more of that life.
·
Try to stretch the length of the customer
lifecycle backward and/or forward, by making the “cool stuff to learn about” accessible at earlier ages and applicable at later
ages. Is it home repair you’re selling, or new cool solar ways to slice and
dice your dwelling flexibly and in line with your own unique fashion sense –
even in doll houses or Sims?
·
Increase customer loyalty to existing products/services
by “crowd-customer-sourcing” their
frequent upgrade, like bees building a hive under your (the queen’s) direction.
·
Increase customer pull to follow-on products by involving them early, focusing on Learn-type products/services/messages (build a
better Lego Star Wars game!), and measuring/interacting two-way with customers rather than relying on the CEO’s “opinion.”
·
Make the brand
a “learning” one (we’re in this
together with the customer, and we’re going to do something insanely great),
and drive comfort with “agile marketing” through the rest of the company by incorporating the idea of being agile in the company brand and culture.
I would also, myself, add three other elements of that
strategy:
·
Both in product and promotional marketing, act
as an integrator and not just as a coordinator of the rest of the
company. Coordinators make sure the
functions don’t stumble over each other; integrators put “all the wood behind
one arrow”, as Scott McNeally of Sun used to say, everything behind one overall
strategy and consistent with one overall brand.
·
Stretch towards transparency to your customers and sacrifice some of that secrecy
from your competitors as a tradeoff. Amazon wins because it always knows more
about the evolution of its customers’ book needs, not because it hides its new
software from its competitors. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere,
coopetition plus agility is a better long-run strategy than cutthroat
competition.
·
Emphasize agile marketing software infrastructure. That is, pick a set “tools
that believe”, tools that aim to foster marketing process agility or “get out
of the way”, to support the marketing process and customer communications. Collaborative
new-product development tools that link in the company’s Web customer “community”
are one example of this.
Nasty Problems
Changing company culture rarely occurs without serious
resistance (is that enough of an understatement for you?). And that is where
the problems with applying this 40,000-foot view of agile marketing strategy to
a ground-level business will typically lie. A frequent theme of the recent
agile marketing manifesto “sprint” was seemingly unavoidable resistance from
the rest of the company – or even other marketers.
Obviously, without enough experience in those situations, I
can’t supply a definitive answer. I can,
however, suggest a couple of strategies:
·
In any in-business confrontation, greater knowledge
of the customer is frequently a trump card. Specifically, if you say “surveys
show that this is the way we are coming
across to the customer”, that is a very good long-run argument when you
either “kick the argument upstairs” or face an inevitable “shoot-out at high
noon.”
·
Most people in business always have a yearning
for “safe change”; why else would
higher-ups enjoy golf, which always involves getting yourself to learn more and
more about how to get better and better, without any real risk to the rest of
your life? However, that has typically been ground under by the so-called
realities of making a profit by getting a fixed thing done on time and on
budget. See if the resister in question
can get the idea that agile is “safe”, that he or she will get it done faster
and better by going agile, and that there is really less risk involved in
continually trying something new, the “agile” way. As many have testified in the past, once
people get that idea, their enthusiasm and
their agile performance is better than before.
Present-Day Agile Marketing Approaches to Build On
For a hotbed of agile marketing ideas, I’d suggest going to
the Agile Marketing Facebook Group first. Here’s a snapshot of some of their “values”
… :
- Validated learning over opinions and conventions.
- Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
- Adaptive and iterative campaigns over big-bang campaigns.
- Process of customer discovery over static prediction.
- Flexible planning vs. rigid planning.
- Responding to change over following a plan.
- Many small experiments over a few large bets.
And “principles”:
- Simplicity is essential.
- Learning via a build, measure, learn feedback loop is the primary
measure of success.
- Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and
pipeline.
- Don't be afraid to fail; just don't fail the same way twice.
- Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design
enhances agility.
- Deliver marketing programs frequently, from every couple of weeks to
every couple of months, with a preference for a shorter time frame.
- Great marketing resources requires close alignment with the business
people, sales, and development.
- Build marketing programs around motivated individuals, give them the
environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
Conclusion: Movements, Agile
Lemonade, and Pay for Fun
Let me close this 40,000-foot view by giving two additional
thoughts possibly useful for agile marketers.
First is that the agile marketing effort bears every stamp of what in
the computer industry is sometimes called a “movement.” What’s a
movement?
I define a movement as a new kind of market, or way to grow
a market, characterized by:
·
Enormous, even quasi-religious, enthusiasm.
·
Participants who act as both initial vendors and
initial consumers.
·
Ability to judge offerings not just by cost and
features, but also “more [agile]” or “less [agile]”.
·
“Tools that believe” – software infrastructure
that embodies the principles (in this case, of agile marketing).
Past examples of movements in the computer industry include
Unix, open source, Linux, the Web – and agile software development.
To foster the success of a movement, I think, is a matter
of:
·
Encouraging rather than “taming” the enthusiasm.
·
Publicizing the eventual, inevitable large-scale
success (P&G?) when it occurs.
·
Moving rapidly to “tools that believe” and
small-scale consultants so that new users see it as “safe” to try agile
marketing.
And so, I think that agile marketers should join, contribute
to, and use the resources and proof points of the agile marketing movement.
My second thought is that I find, in specific situations, “thinking
agile” as a strategist involves taking things presented as problems and
thinking of them as opportunities: “Getting lemons and making agile lemonade.” Worried about hacker attacks? Why not design
security software to place potential customers in a “sandbox”, and then trade
knowledge of them for knowledge of you as a means of determining their bona
fides? The hacker will betray himself/herself by his/her desire to access valuable
company information without offering equivalent personal information in return –
like location. The valued customer will
readily trade appropriate new information about himself/herself, enriching your
ability to serve him/her in future. Problem? Opportunity!
And now, I’d like to close by reminding agile marketers of a
key reason why the game is worth the candle:
Users report that agile makes you feel good because you are constantly
learning and then doing better. Here’s a
story from the late 1990s, in the glory days of computer industry
analysts: I was sitting around with a
fellow analyst at Aberdeen Group and we were talking about what was the real
reason we didn’t chuck it all and go join some cool new Web startup like Webvan.
“You know,” he said to me in a tone of
amazed happiness, “They’re paying us for learning!”
So there’s at least one good reason for agile marketers’
enthusiasm. Taking a 40,000-foot view, learning is where marketing should be headed – and it’s not just
going to be good, it’s going to be fun.
