The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage

Author: Roland Smart

Assessment

This book explains why Marketing and Product Development have to collaborate. The book contains a rather large portion of basic explanation of Agile.

The author aims at explaining the path to modernize marketing.

Important messages

The broadcast era is no more!

We are in the age of "the Empowered Customer" and Marketers have a greater role in business than ever before.

The pace of innovation has greatly increased.

Marketers have the opportunity to serve as stewards for the overall Customer Experience.

Product Development and Marketing need to collaborate closely in order to compete effectively in the market place.

Marketing must follow the transformation of Product Development.

Marketers are perfectly positioned to as act as the feedback conduit between the Customer and the Product Development organization.

The marketing technology is complex, fragmented and overwhelming.

The technology often becomes a distraction from the fundamental tasks of connecting with customers in a simple, clear and concise fashion.

Marketers are about to spend more on technology than their IT department.

Marketing is coming in too late in the development process, when the product is already established.

More than half of the buyers journey is typically completed before the buyer even reaches out to sales.

Sales people should focus more on higher value activities.

Principles

Marketers must act as Product Owners

Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."

Inbound Marketing = Permission Marketing (Seth Godin) = Pull

Agile Marketing Manifesto

Practical tools

Progressive Profiling

Marketing as a service

Step-by-step guide on Content Marketing

Examples

Comcast and Tesla

References

Jim Ewel and agilemarketing.net

Thoughts and Ideas

This book is great when it comes to tearing down the border between Marketing, Sales and Product Development. To follow Roland Smart and his community is a good idea.