Agile Marketing Blue Paper

© 2015 4imprint, Inc. All rights reserved
Agile Marketing: Get ready to adapt
Nimble and flexible. Scrum and sprint. When did marketing begin to sound more
like a mashup of a ballet, a rugby match and a track meet?
With the advent of new channels, instantaneous sharing, ever-changing search
engine algorithms and constant market disruptions—that’s when. Where
marketers used to spend months crafting large campaigns that required high level
approval, they now have to be quick and decisive risk-takers. In one word, agile.
This Blue Paper®
will look at the methodology and practice of agile marketing
and how it differs from more traditional approaches. We’ll highlight case studies
of agile marketing in action, describe the concept’s pros and cons, and outline an
approach for organizations that want to adopt an agile marketing culture.
What is agile marketing?
Perhaps the most celebrated example of agile marketing is Oreo™
cookie’s “You
can still dunk in the dark” tweet during Super BowlSM
XLVII’s power outage. How
did the company respond so deftly to an unpredictable event? The answer is agile
marketing. What appeared to be a single, pithy, perfectly timed tweet was the
result of an agile strategy.
The tweet didn’t magically materialize from the fingertips of a marketer who was
otherwise noshing on buffalo wings and pigs-in-a-blanket. Oreo had a 15-person
team—copywriters, artists and a strategist ready to respond to whatever
happened at the Super Bowl.1
In addition, the tweet was part of an iterative
campaign. Similar tweets from Oreo played off of cultural events from the Mars
Rover landing to the birth of Britain’s Prince George.2
In essence, the company
adopted practices that gave its marketing team the tools and flexibility to say the
right thing at the right time on the right channel. This practice “demands that
the company trusts its creative directors, be it agency or in-house,” says Rhian
Harris, digital marketing consultant at Consult&C Digital. “It requires monitoring
of pretty much every major event and of what people are tweeting and searching
for. It also asks for marketing resources and processes to accommodate for ‘no
planning’ and out-of-office hours.”3
1 Watercutter, Angela. “How Oreo Won the Marketing Super Bowl With a Timely Blackout Ad on Twitter |
WIRED.” Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 04 Feb. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://www.wired.com/2013/02/
oreo-twitter-super-bowl/.
2 Harris, Rhian. “Eight Great Examples of Agile Marketing from Oreo.” Econsultancy. Econsultancy.com Ltd., 29
July 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. https://econsultancy.com/blog/63140-eight-great-examples-of-agile-marketing-
from-oreo/.
3 Ibid.

Agile methodology has developed as marketers are pressured to produce more
relevant content quickly over a variety of devices. On the surface, it may seem to
be a reactive approach to market disruptions, or just a way to work faster. But
when it’s done right, the methodology lays the foundation for a marketing team
to be ready to respond to anything. Imagine a ballerina who makes a pirouette
look effortless. In reality, she has logged years of practice. Agile methodology
provides a foundation to make complex work more adaptable to change and
more relevant to the consumer.
“Most chief marketing officers think of agile in terms of being nimble, being able
to react quickly to the market,” says Barre Hardy, senior director of CMG Partners,
a strategic marketing firm. “They understand that to achieve agility requires
their organization to be data-driven, customer-focused, constantly prioritizing
and quick decision-makers. They also understand that this culture needs to be
supported with process. Where confusion or inconsistency sets in is around agile,
the methodology, and the use of it in marketing. Agile helps reinforce a culture
of agility by providing structure that drives marketers to be iterative, flexible,
customer-centered and focused on priorities of high-value.”4
To understand how we get from ballet and rugby to a sweet tweet, let’s look
at where the concept of agile marketing originated.
Agile history
Before there was agile marketing, there was agile software development. And
before there was agile software development, there was the waterfall method
of software development.5
The waterfall method is a sequential process that
flows from one stage to the next—from requirement specification, to design, to
implementation, to verification, and finally, to maintenance. Like a waterfall, it
flows in one direction. And it is a predictive process—one that predicts what will
be needed down the line.6
There are at least two major pitfalls to the waterfall method: One, the waterfall
method tends to fail like a game of telephone—the handoffs from one stage
to the next can be fraught with miscommunication, resulting in a product that
doesn’t meet the requirements set forth in the beginning. Two, even in a case of
perfect hand-offs, the development process can take so long that by the time the
end stage is reached, user needs have changed.7
4 Rooney, Jennifer. “Applying Agile Methodology To Marketing Can Pay Dividends: Survey.” Forbes. Forbes
Magazine, 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferrooney/2014/04/15/applying-
agile-methodology-to-marketing-can-pay-dividends-survey/.
5 Brinker, Scott. “Agile Marketing for a World of Constant Change - Chief Marketing Technologist.” Chief
Marketing Technologist Blog. Chiefmartec.com, 19 Mar. 2013. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://chiefmartec.
com/2013/03/agile-marketing-for-a-world-of-constant-change/.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.

Frustrated software developers recognized they needed a new method for
project management, one that engendered more communication among people
responsible for different tasks and one that was more adaptive as requirements
changed. In 2001, a group of developers announced what they termed a
“manifesto for agile software development”—an approach that, in their words,
valued individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software
over documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation and
response to change over following a plan.8
In practice, those goals were achieved through new management practices with
colorful descriptions such as scrums (This is where the rugby formation comes
in!), sprints and stand-ups. A scrum in rugby is the method of restarting play
with players packing closely together, heads down. Scrum in terms of project
management is the practice of breaking down a project into a backlog of tasks,
delivering on a few increments at a time, getting feedback and adjusting the
backlog accordingly. Rather than cascading stages à la the waterfall, developers
have an ever-evolving backlog, explains Scott Brinker, co-founder and CTO of
ion interactive. “Probably the most iconic artifact of scrum—and other agile
approaches—is the task board,” Brinker says. “Everyone can see the backlog
of items to be done, ordered according to their priority. Members of the team
take items off the backlog and move them into a work-in-progress column.
When items are completed, they’re triumphantly moved to the ‘done’ column.”9
(Despite the fact that scrum emerged from the software development world, the
scrum board or task board is often a physical board covered with sticky notes,
although digital boards such as TrelloSM
are gaining in popularity.)
In scrum, the backlog of tasks is often expressed in terms of user stories. For
software development, these are stories told from a user perspective about a
desired capability. The typical template is:
As a [type of user], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].10
We’ll see later in the Blue Paper how this template adapts well to
marketing goals.
8 Beck, Kent, et al. “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
N.p., 2001. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://agilemanifesto.org/.
10 Cohn, Mike. “User Stories.” Succeeding With Agile RSS. Moutain Goat Software, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.
http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories.

Figure 1: A scrum board physically displays all of the tasks related to a project
and the status of each task. As tasks are completed, feedback from incremental
accomplishments results in adjustments to the backlog.
Short work cycles (1-4 weeks), where a team of developers takes on specific tasks
with the goal of delivering increments of the working software, are referred to
as sprints. One of the key activities within a sprint is the daily 15-minute stand-up,
where team members literally stand (to keep the meeting short) and answer
three questions:
1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I going to do today?
3. Are there any impediments in my way?11
“The goal is to always have complete transparency among the team,” Brinker
says. “Everyone always knows who’s doing what, it’s easy to stay coordinated,
and if an impediment comes up that’s preventing forward progress, it’s quickly
identified. Other stakeholders are welcome to listen in at these stand-ups, but
they don’t actively participate. In the daily stand-up, the team gets in, syncs
up, and gets on with their work—any impediments or questions from other
stakeholders are handled outside the meeting.”12
12 Ibid.

Figure 2: When applied to marketing, the sprint process allows for small
experiments, feedback and adjustments.
Scrum isn’t the only manifestation of agile methodology. Some adaptations
borrow from lean manufacturing principles. The Kanban method follows the
principles of visualizing workflow, limiting work-in-progress, and analyzing and
improving the process. It uses a board similar to the scrum board. Hybrids such as
“Scrumban” have emerged as well.13
Agile marketing adoption
Given that marketers and software developers face some similar challenges—
particularly market disruptions—it’s not surprising that agile methodologies are
beginning to be applied to marketing.
If agile development delivers software, agile marketing delivers content, Brinker
says. But a better focus, he maintains, is to think about stories along the buyer’s
journey. “They’re analogous to user stories in agile development,” he says.
“Buyer stories might revolve around receiving a particular piece of content to
help with a certain stage of their decision process. But they also might require
more interactive experiences. As a (persona), I want (goal/desire) so that (benefit).
These are stories from the customer’s perspective, although they may be written
by people in marketing and sales on behalf of the customer.”14
13 Pahuja, Savita. “What Is Scrumban? - SolutionsIQ.” SolutionsIQ. Solutions IQ, 08 Apr. 2012. Web. 14 Apr. 2015.
http://www.solutionsiq.com/what-is-scrumban/.
14 Ibid.

Like software developers, agile marketing proponents have issued their own
manifestos. The details vary, but the manifestos tend to emphasize transparency,
sustainability, interactivity, measurability, iterative possibilities and relevancy.15
A 2012 gathering of one group of agile marketers issued this manifesto: “We
are discovering better ways of creating value for our customers and for our
organizations through new approaches to marketing. Through this work, we
have come to value:
• Validated learning over opinions and conventions.
• Customer-focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy.
• Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns.
• The process of customer discovery over static prediction.
• Flexible versus rigid planning.
• Responding to change over following a plan.
• Many small experiments over a few large bets.”16
Becoming agile
How does a manifesto of values translate into marketing practices? Hardy says
that rather than hastily implementing a host of new processes, companies need
to start by taking time to build an agile workplace culture.17
An agile culture
reflects the values of the manifesto—people are cross-functional and empowered
to make decisions; teams are trusted to take initiative and experiment; failure is
acceptable as long as learning is derived from it; work is done in short cycles of
prioritize, test and learn; and the customer is at the center of decision-making.18
Easier said than done. Changing a company culture is no small task. In fact, it may
be one of the hardest any leader takes on. Hardy offers these tips:
• Be clear about goals with those inside and outside of marketing.
• Expect and reward experimentation and creativity as a way of work.
• Put in place processes that support data-driven and customer-focused
decision-making.
• Break down silos and bring together teams that fit the goal, not the
organizational chart.
15 Arnold, Travis. “Roundup: Agile Marketing Manifestos | Travis Arnold.” Travis Arnold. Travis Arnold, 16 May
2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://travisarnold.com/agile-marketing-manifestos/.
16 “Agile Marketing Manifesto.” Agile Marketing Manifesto. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://
agilemarketingmanifesto.org/.
17 Hardy, Barre. “Four Steps to Creating an Agile Marketing Culture.” MarketingProfs. MarketingProfs LLC, 23
Mar. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2015/27316/four-steps-to-creating-an-
agile-marketing-culture#ixzz3WB19HRUr.
18 Ibid.

• Be transparent about goals, progress and support for your agile
teams’ projects.
• Define governance for and empower decision-making to encourage
quick action.
• Use short planning cycles to quickly course-correct based on market or
customer feedback.
• Offer your organization real-time visibility into marketing performance.
• Share “show times” that celebrate and broadcast marketing milestones
and results.
• Identify valued behaviors and build a measurement system around them.
• Develop a system with built-in rewards that reinforce agility and a job
well done.
• Be an example by being curious, learning continually and sharing
new insights.19
Digital brand marketer and content strategist Adria Saracino had an advantage
when she first attempted to introduce an agile culture to a team she managed at
an agency. Rather than having to convince her managers that a culture shift was
needed, it was her supervisor who suggested she try the approach to deal with a
group of employees who tended to work independently.
In addition, Saracino’s agency had a long-time client that had been successfully
using agile methodology, so she used that experience to adapt a plan for her
team. She says that the job of breaking down a project into tasks was easier in
her situation than it would be for software development because, as a marketing
agency, the firm already charged by the hour and had a good sense about how
long particular tasks such as research, writing and editing required. “The key is to
separate the time into tasks that will take between 30 minutes and two hours to
complete, allowing your marketers to break up their day and move from task to
task among different projects or clients,” she says.20
The new agile processes resulted in working more cohesively, improved internal
and external communication, identified the team’s strengths and weaknesses, and
increased accountability.21
Casting those tasks as user stories is a critical component to agile methodology.
Agile marketing consultant Jim Ewel uses a template that includes a persona’s
basic demographics and attributes, a scenario that describes why the persona is
19 Ibid.
20 Saracino, Adria. “How Agile Project Management Saved My Marketing Team.” MarketingProfs.
MarketingProfs LLC, 2 Oct. 2012. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2012/9048/how-
agile-project-management-saved-my-marketing-team#ixzz3WkjyFoZN.
21 Ibid.

interested in the product or service, the persona’s information sources, and the
persona’s goal or benefit related to the product or service. These should be based
on real conversations with customers and data, not experience or hunches.22
“The goal or benefit reminds us that all good marketing should answer a single
question for the customer: What’s In It For Me (WIIFM). Bad marketing focuses
on the vendor’s products and features, rather than the benefits that accrue to
the customer.”23
Where does that validated learning, as opposed to “hunches” come from? Ed
Hewett, senior manager on the Industry Strategy and Marketing team at Adobe®
,
says that marketers should be looking for “tools that resemble boomerangs, not
bullets.”24
Tools that harness the power of agile marketing are those that:
• expose new market trends and customer behaviors
• inform preliminary conclusions
• provide a single view of the customer
• create robust customer profiles useful for predictive and
look-alike modeling
• anticipate the next action or need
• deliver a unified customer experience
• enable fast testing and real-time marketing25
Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloomSM
, a Seattle-based content
marketing and social media agency, outlined in the Harvard Business Review®
a hypothetical agile marketing strategy for the launch of a new clothing line.
He prefaced the strategy by emphasizing that this was a flexible outline, not an
unalterable campaign. “You still can, and should, draw on customer research,
but leave room for growth,” he writes. “Map out your starting point, in as
much detail as you wish, and then roughly outline your vision for the first few
milestones in your campaign, keeping your plans tenuous and easy to adjust.”26
22 Ewel, Jim. “A Foolproof Process for Identifying Your User Stories.” Web log post. Agile Marketing. Jim Ewel, 1
Dec. 2012. Web. http://www.agilemarketing.net/foolproof-process-identifying-user-stories/#more-1319.
23 Ewel, Jim. “User Stories in Agile Marketing.” Weblog post. Agile Marketing. Jim Ewel, 8 Nov. 2011. Web. 13
Apr. 2015. http://www.agilemarketing.net/user-stories-agile-marketing/.
24 Hewett, Ed. “Get Off the Beaten Path with Agile Marketing.” Web log post. Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.
Adobe Systems Inc., 14 May 2014. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-
marketing/get-beaten-path-agile-marketing/.
25 Ibid.
26 DeMers, Jayson. “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business
Publishing, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/01/how-to-craft-an-agile-marketing-
campaign.

DeMars’ hypothetical strategy27
uses the term phases in place of sprints.
It looks like this:
Phase I (Weeks 1-4): Announcements and initial advertising
• Submit press release detailing new clothing line and reinforce through
social media.
• Go live with new clothing products on the e-commerce platform, and
schedule the release of images and links on social profiles.
• Add banner to homepage, showcasing our new fleece-lined jacket, projected
to be our top seller.
• Initiate e-mail blasts to current customers, first announcing the new product
line, then introducing discounted offers in subsequent weeks.
• Introduce weekly articles, each highlighting a new product, and syndicate
through social media.
• Begin Google pay-per-click campaign for new products, highlighting the
fleece-lined jacket and seasonal keywords.
Phase II (Weeks 5-8): Ad reinforcement and consumer engagement
• Reach out through other advertising channels: magazines, direct mail, TV
Phase III (Weeks 9-12): Introduce and promote sale on new products
Phase IV (Week 13): Analyze and regroup
While Phase 1 includes a detailed plan of action—a backlog of tasks that could
be cast as user stories, the remaining phases are broad, allowing the company
to evaluate successes and failures and make minor tweaks or major adjustments
as necessary. DeMers also recommends starting small, particularly if you are
testing the waters of a new marketing channel, and taking breaks to evaluate
the effectiveness of the strategy, especially toward the end of each phase. To help
determine how the strategy may take shape or be tweaked through all phases,
DeMers recommends these measures:
• Regularly visit industry news sites to stay on top of developments and
consider how they could affect your marketing plans.
• Watch what your competitors are publishing and how well received their
ideas are.
• Keep in close touch with your target audiences. Conduct regular user surveys
and measure how existing and potential customers interact with your brand.
27 Ibid.

• Track behavior on your website, through social sharing, and in reviews and
comments. How are people’s priorities changing? What new tools are they
using to make their lives easier?
• Adopt new trends early, and drop them when they appear to decline
in relevance.28
Agile challenges
According to the 9th annual State of Agile™
Survey from VersionOne®
Inc., these
are the top five barriers to agile adoption (respondents were able to make
multiple selections):
• The inability to change organizational culture (44 percent)
• Not enough personnel with the necessary agile experience (35 percent)
• General organizational resistance to change (34 percent)
• Pre-existing rigid/waterfall framework (32 percent)
• Lack of manager support (29 percent)29
Respondents to this survey came from a variety of industries, with software
developers representing the largest group. But Hardy agrees that agile adoption
among marketing organizations faces similar challenges: complex organizational
structures, cultures that prohibit quick decision making, a lack of collaboration,
slow processes and a volume of work that causes teams to be always reacting
versus working on initiatives that will drive growth.30
“It’s hard to create a culture
of agility in your organization if employees are afraid to fail or take risks, if you
have cumbersome approval processes, or unclear goals and objectives,” she says.
“Chief marketing officers can control these within their organizations, but if the
wider business isn’t also focused on agility, these can be harder to control.”31
Beyond organizational culture, agile methodology requires employees to work
cross-functionally. “In agile, we often talk about ‘T-shaped’ people, who may have
deep specialization or talent in a particular area—say, user interface (UI) design—
but are also willing to pitch in on a wide variety of other tasks,” Brinker says. “In
an agile team, everybody pitches in on everything. No one says, ‘I’m just the UI
person, so don’t bother me until you have some UI for me to do.’”32
28 DeMers, Jayson. “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign.” Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business
Publishing, 21 Jan. 2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/01/how-to-craft-an-agile-marketing-
campaign.
29 “9th Annual State of Agile™ Survey.” State of Agile Survey (2015): 10. VersionOne.com. VersionOne LLC,
2015. Web. 13 Apr. 2015. www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development-survey-ninth.pdf.
31 Ibid.

Agile benefits
Adopting agile methodology isn’t easy, especially if it requires a wholesale shift
in organizational culture. But as market forces experience their own wholesale
disruptions—again and again—agile methodology may be the solution to
staying ahead of those disruptions. The top three reasons cited in the State of
Agile Survey for adopting agile practices were to accelerate product delivery (59
percent), to enhance the ability to manage changing priorities (56 percent) and to
increase productivity (53 percent).33
Hardy identifies these upsides to the hard work of introducing Agile into the
marketing workflow:
1. Business performance. “Marketers who have adopted Agile are seeing
increased business performance due to faster delivery, enhanced focus
on the things that matter, and greater productivity from their teams,”
Hardy says.34
2. Employee satisfaction. “Perhaps the most unexpected benefit of marketing
agility is employees working in agile environments report a greater
overall sense of satisfaction and pride in their work due to feeling more
empowered, greater clarity in how their role impacts the business, and a
more collaborative work environment,” she says.35
3. Adaptability. “Marketers are better equipped to handle marketplace
challenges and opportunities having built flexibility into their business
operations,” she says. “This is positioning marketing leaders to deliver
sustainable growth for their companies.”36
One final benefit to agile methodology is failure—as long as it results in learning
that leads to big wins. Agile strategy is all about doing small experiments,
learning from those experiments and adapting. Corey Eridon of HubSpotSM
Inc.
recalls that when PinterestSM
started gaining traction, the agile marketing team at
HubSpot experimented with it, not knowing whether it would catch on. As we all
know, Pinterest became a social media phenomenon, and HubSpot was prepared
to offer helpful tips. “Wins happen for agile marketers all the time because they
are used to learning quickly and aren’t afraid of failure—because working on
33 “9th Annual State of Agile™ Survey.” State of Agile Survey (2015): 7. VersionOne.com. VersionOne LLC, 2015.
Web. 13 Apr. 2015. www.versionone.com/pdf/state-of-agile-development-survey-ninth.pdf.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.

4imprint serves hundreds of thousands of customers with promotional items throughout the United States,
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a day-to-day basis to achieve your larger goals helps you bounce back from your
flops in record time, with minimal resources squandered during the pursuit,”
Eridon says.37
Most companies today don’t have the time or resources to risk a big-bang style
campaign that could fail, either because the message or the medium or the
timing was off. On the other hand, small, quick—agile—experiments, initiated
in a culture that supports risk taking and collaboration, and keeps customer
desires and validated learning at the forefront, can offer high value even if the
result is more learning and adaption rather than a tweet that goes viral beyond
the imagination.
“It’s reached a point where we need to step back from chasing fixes for the latest
disruption du jour,” Brinker says. “Instead, we need to consider ways we can make
our organizations more adaptive to change in general. To change how we think
about change. So that when the next new thing explodes—maybe next week—
we’re better able to capitalize on it.”38
37 Levin, Lior. “Five Advantages of Agile Marketing.” MarketingProfs. MarketingProfs LLC, 21 Feb. 2013.
Web. 13 Apr. 2015. http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2013/10152/five-advantages-of-agile-
marketing#ixzz3X8Qg6Uwb.

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