Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative

Book Preface

It’s a fascinating time to work in marketing.

It’s also a somewhat dizzying time, with so much change happening around us.

The world is becoming more digital every day, steadily reshaping relationships between customers and businesses in the process. Buyers have more information, more options, and more leverage in when, where, and how they engage with sellers. And their expectations are rising, as state-of-the-art, digitally native companies—from Amazon.com to Uber—push the limits of what is possible into what is desired and then demanded.

For some businesses, that may still seem like a far-off, foreign realm. Not many of us aim to compete with those digital wunderkinder. Yet every day, we see more signs of digital dynamics infiltrating the space between us and our customers, disrupting sales and marketing in a thousand small ways—and not-so-small ways. We feel the tremors of our competitive landscape shifting.

On closer inspection, that realm is not so far-off after all.

The fact is that in a digital world, inherently, we are all entangled in digital dynamics.

“How did my business go digital?” With apologies to Ernest Hemingway, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Regardless of size, geography, or industry, the digital age is upon us.

The accelerating tempo and growing complexity that this brings—especially to marketing—is both exhilarating and exasperating. It is a whirlwind of obstacles and opportunities.