Agile MarketingWhen clear and simple processes drive innovation

David Quinn, Senior Director,

Corporate Marketing at EMC

Corporation, and his Agile

Marketing team:

Steve Colombo, Amy Callahan,

Carolyn Cerce, Jill Fitzgerald,

Ellen Deutsch

EDITORS

www.emc.com

Available on

AppStore

GooglePlay

&Available on

“Agile Marketing” is a thought-provoking

booklet created by EMC’s Agile Marketing Team,

led by David Quinn, Senior Director, Corporate

Marketing at EMC Corporation

3

I’ll start with a simple question. Why does marketing exist?

I’ll spare you the dozens of ‘official’ definitions that are

living out there (that you probably know all too well) and

move on to the essence of the matter. Marketing is here

to help us sell products and services to consumers, right?

Only the latter have changed so much over the last few

years that it’s actually scary. They are not the only ones to

have undergone such a dramatic transformation, though:

the amount of information available has, our tools have

and–perhaps most alarming of all–our competition has.

And yet, in the midst of this ever-increasing pace of

permanent changes, a lot of us marketers keep doing what

we always did, without rethinking the way we work too

much. Maybe we went a little digital. But that’s pretty much

it. My Agile Marketing team (about which you will learn more in chapter 2) and I think it is time

for something new. We believe that a shift to an agile marketing model is the right change.

This e-book tells the story of agile marketing and of how we, at EMC, successfully embraced

this methodology to tackle some of the challenges our marketing department was struggling

with. To understand the concept of agile marketing, and EMC’s own case story, it is essential

to realize that the underlying ideas and approaches are rooted in the simple fact that our

environment has changed dramatically. These evolutions have a— direct or indirect—impact

on the way we manage our marketing activities. To me, this broader picture is key to grasping

why and how we have moved our methodologies in the direction we have over the last couple

of years. I feel a lot of us marketers tend to focus too much on the ‘small’ world of just our

department, our company, our Management, our strategy and our (internal) customers. In

the current connected economy everything influences everything else, so we must accept the

outside so that we know how to function ‘on the inside’. That is actually the very first step to

becoming an agile organization.

Happy reading!

If you are interested in learning how EMC’s solutions can help

your company, please find more information on www.emc.com.

For more information on EMC’s implementation

of Agile Marketing I can be reached via Twitter at :

Dear Reader,

David QuinnSenior Director, Corporate Marketing

at EMC Corporation5

@DavidQuinn1004

1Long term planning is a thing of the past. This is the time for keeping up and running.

6

7

Chapter

Marketing in the moment

1Remember when decision-makers could sit down and

think? And then think some more? And dream up a clever,

long-term plan? And then wait for the others to read it? And

have it go back and forth until everyone–or the majority, or

just the one with the loudest voice—agreed that that was

the way to go? And remember when the entire organization

‘stuck’ to the plan for the entire period that it was meant to

be followed? Those days are pretty much over.

Today, we have changes and insights flying at us from all

directions. This is no time to be complacent. This is the

moment for keeping up and running. The laws of the market

have changed and so should we. Because this is the age of

the community. The era of the network. The epoch of ‘all

Why the ‘old’ marketing should move on.

for one and one for all’. Contrary to common belief, we are still dealing very much with mass

marketing today. Be it in a totally different format than before. The mass is just hidden behind

the individual. And he is a force to be reckoned with: as difficult to catch (or keep) as he is

powerful.

Our customers have indeed undergone a massive transformation over the last years. They

are more demanding, more vocal and more connected than ever. Their attention spans keep

on shortening. So we will want to treat them in just the way they want. And they do want a

lot. They want to be recognized over all the different channels they are hopping between.

They want relevant information, dialogue and welcome advice that recognizes them as the

unique individual they believe themselves to be. ‘Old marketing’ approaches based on a

slowly evolving one-way monologue – telling them what to do, instead of listening to what

they want - will no longer do in this new supersonic environment.

The Internet is responsible for the greater part of this evolution, of course. It has completely

changed how consumers decide to buy. The purchasing process used to be a combination

8

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment

of an initial stimulus, the fi rst and the second moment of truth. If our ads were effective, the

consumer responded to this incentive by visiting our stores or contacting one of our sales

people. Then, the combination of the product and service and the salesperson would–in the

best case–result in a purchase (the fi rst moment of truth). Once home, or in the offi ce with

the product, the consumer used it and formed an opinion of his or her purchase: the second

moment of truth. All in all, buying used to be a pretty straightforward and linear experience.

Over the years this traditional funneled process

has exploded to form a complex map of touch

points. Just to give some examples from the

Google/Shopper Sciences study: 50% of

consumers used a search engine to fi nd out

information before buying, 49% talked with friends/family about the product, 38% compar-

ison-shopped online, 36% sought information for a product brand/manufacturer Website,

31% read product reviews or endorsements online, etc.1 Google calls this comprehensive,

online decision-making period the ‘Zero Moment of Truth’. So we’d better have strategies and

tactics for showing up at the right place, at the right time with the right content.

So it is safe to say that our environment has multiplied in intricacy over the years. Professional

experiences used to be linear and clean-cut. The fast-paced, dynamic and networked char-

acter of today’s market has changed all that. We need to evolve along with the market. Rigid,

long-term planning and siloed thinking is no longer relevant in this context. In fact, in a world

1

ZMOT eats the marketing funnel for breakfast.

Buyers

Eyeballs

Awareness

Consideration

Preference

Action

Loyalty

From the linear & clear-cut marketing funnel…

… to the comprehensive ‘Zero Moment

of Truth’

9

that is ruled by complexity, unpredictability, volatility and

the intricate interdependencies between connected parts,

being slow and inflexible is frankly dangerous.

There is no denying that this slow and seriously consid-

ered approach did make sense at one time, of course. TV

ads, for instance, were (and still are) extremely expensive.

Getting it wrong, meant losing a lot of cold hard cash. So

marketers cultivated a low tolerance of failure and thought

very slowly and prudently–backed up by a lot of expensive

market research and focus groups–about what their next

approach would be. They made (long term) plans and care-

fully stuck to them. Made sense. But with cheaper channels

like websites, online tests and social media that are so

much more flexible - and fast - it no longer does.

Our current world is actually too complex to be stabilized,

structured and predicted. Static, locked in and uncom-

promising organizations will not be able to survive in this

environment. “It is those organisms best adapted to the

environment that will have a greater chance of surviving”2,

remember? And agile marketing is just the right way to

approach an unstable market, knowledgeable customers

and an increasingly fast competition.

Before we go into more details about agile

marketing, let me first tell you author and stat-

istician Nate Silver’s story of the fox and the

hedgehog. According to him hedgehogs are

those people who tend to see the world through

their ‘big ideas’ about the role of government, the

effect of taxes on the economy, etc. They are ’type A’ personalities who believe in governing

principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird

virtually every interaction in society.” They tend to be specialized, they believe order can be

accomplished and are usually very reluctant to change their predictions.

Foxes, on the other hand, are “scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and

in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem.” Silver feels that ‘foxes’ make better

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.

The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing.

Peter Drucker, author and management consultant

Archilochus, Greek poet

The fox and the hedgehog: why agile marketing makes sense

Individuals and

interactions over

processes and tools

Working software

over comprehensive

documentation

Customer

collaboration over

contract negotiation

Responding

to change over

following a plan

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment

1

To fully grasp what agile marketing is all about,

you first need to understand that the meth-

odology behind it has its roots in IT. The agile

software development methodology was born

on a (possibly) sunny day somewhere in the nineties. And in February 2001, 17 software

developers had a brainstorming session at the Snowbird (Utah) resort to discuss lightweight

development methods. Their ‘Manifesto for Agile Software Development’, that eventually

came out of that, is a good place to start, to explain the basics of this approach:

predictions because they are more willing to consider multiple points of view, and they are

less likely to view everything through their partisan lens.

Marketers today should be a lot more like these foxes. They move forward in small steps. They

are permanently monitoring and measuring their environment. They incorporate ideas from

different disciplines, regardless of their origin. They are tolerant of complexity, and do not try

to fight it with order. They know that sometimes, you do need to fight fire with fire. Presented

with new data, they are quick to adapt.3

So, should we stop planning altogether? Of course not. You need both. In IT, there is the

concept of ‘dual speed’: one part of it is fairly static and the other part changes permanently.

The same goes for marketing. You need strategy and long–well, longer–term planning. The

big difference is that today we should not write our shiny one-year marketing plans in stone.

If the market modifies, we re-evaluate and adapt them. We have to be agile about our plans.

The roots of agile marketing.

This agile methodology was an answer to the traditional

waterfall approach in the software development world. It

was called that because, on paper, the process did kind

of look like a waterfall, cascading sequentially from one

stage to another. A project would start with comprehensive

requirements gathering. Once they were finalized, archi-

tects would map out the design. Once that was done then

developers would begin implementation. Then it would go

on to verification, delivery, and maintenance forever after.

10

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and

helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

11

The problem with that was that this process was sluggish

and it is just a plain reality that requirements do change

over time. By the time the implementation was over, the

software was often already quite outdated. Even worse,

communication with the client was kept to a minimum

resulting in a shortage of verification during the devel-

opment process. It was not uncommon for developers

to arrive - beyond happy with themselves - with their

nice, shiny software. Only to find the client furious and

demanding a re-do, claiming that this was not what he had

ordered… at all!

The agile approach was a smart answer to this conundrum.

It has a strong customer and quality focus. It works in small

iterative steps. It stimulates face-to-face conversation

and collaboration between empowered cross-functional

teams and other stakeholders. It is based on the perma-

nent delivery of small chunks of results. It favors continual

measuring, review, feedback and ongoing adaptation. And

it tries to keep everything simple. That is how you operate

when the market changes at the speed of light and your

customers keep growing more volatile by the day.

So much for the ‘history’ lesson. This part has been kept

deliberately short because we strongly believe that no

marketer should literally copy this IT approach. That would

be a perfect recipe for disaster. Every company should ‘marketize’ (yes, we are stretching the

use of this term, but it describes exactly what it should) and personalize the agile methodology.

So, agile marketing is definitely not a rigid copy of agile development. And while we are at

it, here’s another thing it certainly is NOT: controlled chaos. On the contrary. Agile is a very

process-driven, even orderly methodology that allows its practitioners to respond and adapt

quickly, in a market dictated by speed.

To our team, as well as many others, agile marketing centers on two poles of excellence:

Adaptation and Collaboration. We will explain how we perceive agile marketing by unifying all

its main characteristics by means of these two main themes.

Before going into more detail about the main characteristics of agile marketing, my

team has tried to pull together a definition of how we see it, as there are so many

different definitions bandied about.

We view it as a clean and simple process-driven manner of marketing that stimulates

transparent communication, collaboration and the sharing of intelligence and expe-

rience. In reality, it does this by utilizing empowered and multidisciplinary teams with

a strong sense of individual accountability, regular short meetings, short delivery

cycles, continuous measuring and a ‘fail fast and learn’ philosophy. Its ultimate goals

are speedy adaptation and proactive innovation in response to a market that is as

fast as it is unpredictable. Agile marketing is never ‘done’, it is always in flux.

Agile marketing, a short definition

12

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

H. G. Wells

13

ChapterMarketing

in the moment

1.1When rafting in rapid waters, you do not try to steer in a

straight line. One needs to nimbly and constantly change

course to maneuver around the unexpected rocks that

might tear the boat apart. Just like that, today’s market is

not about linear travel from A to Z with fixed stopovers and

a predictable end station. Rather it is about the flexibility

to choose the right direction at the right time all the while

navigating a gazillion little forks in the road.

So how can agile marketing help you, to be well… more

agile? First of all, it helps one plan, but in a much more

iterative and adaptive manner. It teaches us to chop

up big plans or projects into little chunks. It allows us to

experiment in a safe environment. It tells us to stay critical

about how we work and to keep reinventing ourselves. And

it frees us from the dictatorship of perfection.

For most people–except maybe a

few pioneers–innovating is perfectly

counterintuitive. Why would we put our

faith in something if we are not 100% sure it will even work, right? One of the reasons for this

reserve towards the new is that our brain always tries to be as ‘lazy’ as possible. Perfectly

understandable: it takes up no less than 25% of our body’s energy.4

So if our brain can transform something into a habit, it will. Habits are governed in the very

center of our brain—the basal ganglia—which creates routines by means of a habit loop.

This loop always comes in the same format: a cue (e.g. a business owner asks us for a mini-

product-website), a routine (e.g. you have a template ready for that, so you use it) and a

reward (e.g. the business user is happy that you were able to work quickly because of that

template.). Our brain creates these habits out of sheer efficiency: they automate certain

thoughts or movements so our brain needs to ‘think’ less.5 This kind of cognitive efficiency is,

unfortunately, the arch enemy of innovation.

Habits & innovation

Adapt

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment - 1.1 Adapt

1

These psychological bar-

riers are why most of us keep

doing what we are doing.

And why we naturally hold

back from innovation. The

agile methodology is smart,

though. It knows that we are

afraid, or at the very least extremely cautious, when it comes to trying new things and fearful

of making mistakes. So it creates a safe environment for trial and error.

The problem with habits is that they are so ingrained into the brain that they are exceedingly

diffi cult to break. For example: homeowners cut their lawns in the same pattern every week.

They like the pattern…. It makes sense to them. It looks good to them. It feels good to them

and week to week it’s ‘easier’ to do it the same way. Try convincing someone to switch that

up! The same goes for habits: they wear a path in our brain which can be changed, but never

actually disappears. Never underestimate the power of habit.

It gets worse. Our brain even fears change, because–long ago, when it started to develop–

every change in our environment could bring death. You were chilling in your cavern during

the Pleistocene, maybe eating some mammoth meat, and everything was as it was. Great.

And then something changed: a cave lion, maybe. Not so great. That is why our brain is really

suspicious of change stimuli. This basic instinct is still wired in our synapses.6

Secondly, agile enables an organizational culture that does

not punish failure. You cannot decide to go agile, have your

people believe that innovation and experimentation beats

doing safe things and then ‘punish’ them when they make

a mistake. We would almost say “don’t bother trying agile

marketing if you are not prepared to accept that mistakes

will be made”. In fact, there will probably be a lot of them.

This tolerance of failure is not an option. Companies with

a severe mistake allergy will harvest an “If it ain’t broke,

First of all, agile marketing teaches us to scale experiments

down to a manageable size. If we try out smaller things,

when they do not work out, we just move on quickly to

other small bets with little harm done. Agile teaches us how

to fail fast, learn from it and then readjust. It helps us adapt

in baby steps and reduces the threat of spectacular failures.

It is less about incredibly expensive Big Bang marketing

efforts, and more about divided little experiments.

14

I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life

and that is why I succeedMichaelJordan

Sheltering change.

15

don’t fix it” culture. And this will result in the innovation

… of absolutely nothing. That is a very rocky road to be

going down today. Even yesterday, for that matter, if we can

believe the research that Shell performed to uncover the

secrets of long-lived companies.7 Besides fostering decen-

tralization and collaborative forms of management (flat

organization, anyone?), these long-lived companies were

particularly tolerant of activities in the margin: outliers,

experiments and eccentricities within the boundaries of the

cohesive firm, which kept stretching their understanding of

possibilities. Real survivors and winners have always cher-

ished experiments, and–as one needs to be when testing

things out–were thus tolerant of failure. In today’s fast-

moving environment, this mindset is even more essential.

We understand that this may just appear ‘wrong’ to most

marketing organizations. Because we have been brought

up to believe that all blunders will cast a shadow on our

reputation . But those who decide to take the leap, will

be walking with giants. Google, just to call out a relevant

big hitter, is well-known for its ‘fail fast and learn’ culture.

Susan Wojcicki, Google’s Senior Vice-President of Adver-

tising, even incorporated “Never fail to fail” a while ago into

her “eight pillars of innovation”. She describes how two of

the first projects she worked on at Google—AdSense and

Google Answers—were both uncharted territory for the company. While AdSense grew to be

a multi-billion-dollar business, Google Answers (which lets users post questions and pay an

expert for the answer) was retired after four years.

Even while Google Answers failed, Wojcicki said they learned a lot in that time, and were

able to apply the knowledge they had gathered to the development of future products. She

states “If we’d been afraid to fail, we never would have tried Google Answers or AdSense, and

missed an opportunity with each one”. True, these ‘experiments’ can hardly be called small

bets (though they might seem so to a giant like Google), but the spirit in which they were

developed, fits within the philosophy of ‘fail fast’.

Spotify does it differently: with small quick and dirty experiments that are killed really fast

if they don’t work. Their ‘squads’—similar to scrum teams and designed to feel like a mini-

startup–are even encouraged to spend roughly 10% of their time on ‘hack days’. On those

days employees do whatever they want, typically trying out new ideas and sharing them with

colleagues.

“We’re here trying to ‘manufacture & fail’ on a regular basis, and we think that’s how you

learn”, is how Dave McClure, the angel investor and founder of 500 start-ups, put it. “Getting

used to that, bouncing back from that, being able to figure out what people hate and turn that

into what people love... If you’re not willing to take the risk of failing and experience failure,

you’re never going to figure out what the right path is to success.”8

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment - 1.1 Adapt

1

If you want to be able to react in a fl exible manner to the market, you must know what really

works and what does not. And you must know it all the time, because what was effective

yesterday will not necessarily be so today or tomorrow. Agile marketing is therefore big on

testing and measuring. Not just after the project, like traditional marketers do. During the

entire marketing engagement as well.

The good news is that, now more than ever, we have solutions at hand to carefully analyze

most of our efforts, and even in (near) real time. All kinds of smart web analytics tools can

show us how customers came to our website, how long they stayed there and where they

went before leaving or buying. Clever Big Data solutions can even analyze video streams

from in-store camera systems and create mappings of customer foot traffi c throughout the

stores. Once merged with sales data we are now able to optimize the product placement in

our stores. Or we can use social media sentiment analysis to learn how consumers really feel

about our company, brand or services.

No wonder that Gartner predicted that, by 2017, the CMO

will spend more on IT than the CIO does. It did not always

use to be so. Remember when John Wannamaker said “Half

the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I

don’t know which half”.

Continuous monitoring and measuring of how our efforts

infl uence consumers allows us to keep learning what is

actually working and what we should change. The awkward

thing is that a lot of (marketing) organizations lack the

elasticity and innovation mindset to really act upon this

information in a timely fashion. This is one of the major

points where an agile methodology can prove to be of

value.

16

Testing, testing, one, two

17

Another important part

of agile marketing is

the ‘Good Enough’ prin-

ciple. In agile marketing,

perfect is the enemy of

good. Because timing is everything is today’s fast-paced

market. Some marketers will have difficulty with this. They

will want to get everything right before getting their website

or e-book out there. Those who wait for 100% perfection

may spend so much time getting there that they risk losing

the valuable window of opportunity. They also fail to realize

that total control is an illusion in an environment that

moves like greased lightning, anyhow.

Now, please do not misunderstand our position. It is

commendable to be striving for perfection. We all need

that mindset if we want to achieve great things. You should

always aim for excellence, settle for good and don’t sweat

the mistakes when they happen.

Parting with Perfection

Boring is the right

thought at the wrong time. Jack Gardner

author

18

Two people will collectively know more than one.

Three will know more than two. And when you have a room full of smart people sharing their knowledge,

there’s very little you can’t accomplish together.

Douglas C. Merrill, organizational guru

and former CIO at Google

19

ChapterMarketing

in the moment

1.2We are living in a world that is brimming over with data

and information. And it is coming at us from all sides at

the same time: from our own neatly stacked databases and

metadata or in a much more messy, unstructured format

from the Internet, social networks, smartphones, digital

TV, security cameras, voter registrations, sports statistics,

weather reports, etc. And it keeps growing. Faster and

faster. In the US alone, the digital universe9 is expected to

grow from 898 exabytes to 6.6 zettabytes between 2012

and 2020. That is more than 25% a year!10

Though incredibly full of potential for organizations when

analyzed correctly–not in the least for their marketing

departments–this abundance of information has severe

consequences for our individual employees as well. To put

it very bluntly: the more information there is at hand, the

more difficult it is to simply “keep up” by yourself. And it’s not that our brains are becoming

less developed. Rather it is our individual relative knowledge level which is decreasing

through no fault of our own. It’s informational overload at its core.

In such an environment, having employees or even departments work alone on their little

island is not an option. We all know silos crush intelligence. Today is all about building

bridges and destroying useless boundaries. The more connections you have, the smarter you

are. Our brain functions that way11, and so should our companies. Because when our markets

and our consumers act like networks, so should we. If ’location, location, location’ is the

motto of real estate agents, then ‘connection, connection, connection’ should be that of the

agile organization, be it marketing or other.

That is why smart companies work with connectors. Virtual ‘linkers’ like online internal

communities and smart knowledge management systems. Or architectural unifiers like open

office spaces that increase communication and contact between employees. Or human ones

like social media specialists that connect with our customers.

Collaborate!

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment - 1.2 Collaborate!

1We too, at EMC, use such connectors in our agile marketing

story, as you will learn in the next chapter. We work with

Engagement Managers that bridge the gaps between

the business owners in our company and our numerous,

slightly siloed marketing sub-departments.

Surprisingly though, many of our marketing departments

are still built in a very top-down and stovepiped manner.

Collaboration for them is just passing a finished piece of

‘product’ on to the next one, with very little communication

or interaction between all the separate players. They afford

very few connections to their fellow employees of other

departments. Agile marketing can help solve that problem.

It is all about creating bridges between departments, branches, employees, projects and

partners. It is about connected collaboration. Between business and marketing. Between

marketing and IT. And between our ultra-specialized experts that need to work together like

closely knit guerrilla groups and combine their talents.

Agile marketing is so serious about collaboration that

it streamlines it by means of a methodology, that the

development world calls ‘Scrum’. This agile software

development framework has a strong focus on team

unity, face-to-face communication and customers. It

is well suited for projects with rapidly changing or highly emergent requirements. In other

words, perfect for a marketing environment.

20

Markets are disappearing, becoming networks of

information with the customer at their heart. And if the outside world

becomes a network, companies will have to

follow suit.

Peter Hinssen IT thought leader and author

The agile collaboration method

The process starts with a project backlog. This is a well-defined list of tasks requested

by the business owner or developed by the team to achieve their goals. It evolves

via a series of short iterations called sprints, which last from one to four weeks. Each

sprint begins with a brief planning meeting and concludes with a review.

During the Sprint Planning meeting, the team reviews the project backlog and agrees

upon the tasks to be accomplished during the current sprint. During the entire sprint,

How Scrum works

21

With this approach, everyone involved in the team knows everything they need to know

about the project on a permanent basis and–as important—they know that the others know

it too. Everyone agrees together on what the priorities are too, which is a problem that a lot

of marketing departments are facing (often the prioritized project is the one tabled by the

business owner that is screaming the loudest or carries the most weight).

The great thing about this methodology and especially the daily standup meetings is

that you create an ultra-transparent and open environment that leaves little room for

miscommunication.

the team meets up every day for a short 15-minute standup meeting. People are

literally standing up during them, in order to force them to really keep it short and

efficient. The goal is to have each member of the team answer three questions at the

standup meetings:

What did I do yesterday?

Are there any obstaclesthat stand in my way?

What will I do today?

1 32

One of the strongest

forces of agile marketing

is the manner in which

it works with cross-

functional teams. The standup meetings have business

owners, with very different backgrounds, working alongside

marketing professionals of all kinds. Team members learn

tips, tricks, approaches or insights from one another

which they would never have gleaned on their own. When

you go agile, you will be surprised how much you and

your colleagues will learn about your organization or the

expertise of others. Information that is hugely valuable to

everyone trying to maneuver in a fast paced environment.

Combining forces

Innovation is not grown in a

greenhouse, it evolves in an

ecosystem. The Cross Innovation Manifesto12

Chapter one Marketing in the m

oment - 1.2 Collaborate!

1

22

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind

whom were centuries of work…. To teach that a comparatively

few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of

mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. Henry Ford

This interconnected thinking and innovation ecosystem

that agile marketing enables reminds of what cross-inno-

vators are trying to do. True, this is a different story than

agile marketing. But we want to prove that innovation is

often just the pooling and combination of little, clever

thoughts. It does not always come from one big pioneering

idea that no one ever thought of, although that is how most

people do perceive innovation. Clever originals like CREAX

help companies innovate based on the great premise that

“Somewhere, someone has already solved your problem”.

Their cross-functional experts solve specific problems by

offering a helicopter view on existing technologies across

all industries.

And such an approach does work. Wildcat Discovery Tech-

nologies, for instance, applies drug discovery technology to

design better batteries in the same way that pills are devel-

oped. Sometimes innovation is ‘just’ recycling something

from another industry. Even some of the ‘big’ innovations

were born that way. Henry Ford, pioneer from the auto-

mobile industry and founder of the Ford Motor Company,

boldly stated the following:

The agile methodology enables something similar. Different minds with different back-

grounds and expertise work together and enlighten each other with information they would

likely never have acquired otherwise.

23

One of the best benefits of the emphasis of agile marketing

on close collaboration, comes in the form of greater trans-

parency and accountability. When a project team talks

so openly about their achievements, the to do’s and the

challenges they are facing, you create a certain kind of

peer pressure-induced state of accountability. When you

promised everyone “My website copy will be ready in 2

weeks” but never told them, at any of the standup meet-

ings between then and the deadline, that there was no way

you would be ready in time, you know that you will not be

It’s onyou!

viewed favorably to say the least. You will be held fully responsible for wasting the other team

members’ – who were counting on you to be ready – time. So you are compelled to tell the

others “I will not make it”.

Some of you might wonder if such a structured and process-driven approach to marketing

will stifle creativity. We firmly believe the opposite. Agile marketing’s efficient way of working

and communicating frees up time to be more inventive. It allows different personalities to

fertilize each other’s ideas into something even more original. It grants the right to try out

‘crazy’ things, fail fast, adapt and learn from them. If you do it right, it will drive imagination

and innovation.

That concludes the more general and conceptual part of our story. Now, let’s all go to the

lobby. Bear with me, here. There is a valid reason why we should begin there. All will be

revealed in chapter 2.

2Our Engagement

Managers build bridges between all

the stakeholders in a marketing project

24

25

Chapter

EMC Corporate Marketing goes agile:

our story22

We are big believers in how actions and reality checks

eat words for breakfast any day of the week. Any ‘how to’

booklet is essentially an empty vessel until you enrich it

with a real life example. So we will tell you the story – of

how we, at EMC, implemented agile marketing. This is the

tale of our team and the Corporate Marketing organization.

It is a human success story. And a real adventure. We are

extremely proud of what we accomplished, but as with

every big change, there were some bumps in the road. And

as ‘agile’ dictates, we will be open about those too because

the painful parts of reality are so critical to the success of

anything we undertake.

First off…we did not embrace agile

marketing to just “do something

different”. We were aware, and recognized

that we had two very serious challenges

handicapping our Corporate Marketing

organization: one from the perspective of Corporate Marketing and another one from that

of our business owners. The challenges were not new nor were they uncommon. Fortunately,

Jonathan Martin, our SVP of Marketing is all about trying new ideas and taking a risk to force

improvements. He challenged us to address the issues and we took it on with his backing

and support.

The first issue was our Corporate Marketing department was continuously overwhelmed with

requests. Some of it had to do with our type A, hard driving culture. “The more I do, the

Solving two business problems

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2better I’m doing”: that was pretty much the mindset of our internal workforce. And most of

the time this drive to achieve is a good thing – but not in every situation. In reaction to this

continuously strained workload, the Corporate Marketing teams often prioritized in a less

than scientifi c manner – because it was their only choice and sole way to survive. If you

were a very well connected colleague—or maybe just a really nice one—your project naturally

landed near the top of the pile. But if you were too pushy or failed to follow through in past

encounters you were likely to be in for a signifi cant wait. This is not a condemnation of anyone

…this is just human nature. And we will bet that we are not the only ones dealing with this

kind of situation.

The second challenge that we had to tackle was that our business owners–those requiring

the services of (multiple) Corporate Marketing functions—were pretty much left to their

own devices. They often had to guess which of the Corporate Marketing groups they had

to engage, possibly forgetting rather important ones through no fault of their own. And if

they did become aware that they needed additional help and capabilities, it often came to

light at the very end of a project or effort. Such oversight is not surprising when working

with 17 different functions (website, creative, social media, video…) and about 180 different

specialists. As an example our dedicated SEO experts, were constantly being overlooked at

the outset and were often asked to participate when it was already too late and copy had to

be adapted to set things right. The result? ... Wasted time, rework and project delays.

Because of the rather stovepiped working model of Corporate Marketing, these business

owners had to address all the different functions separately, ending up repeating the same

story numerous times. This was not only ineffi cient from a time management point of view;

an extra danger was that their content and requests were often partially lost in translation.

Agile marketing is very big on collaboration. So the fi rst

thing we did when we undertook the task of investigating

the problem, was to get together a team (of volunteers) to

defi ne how we were going to address these issues within

our organization. And, in the spirit of working as a collabo-

26

Participative evaluation

In corporate culture change, always involve all your stakeholders at a very early stage

27

rative unit, one of our first ideas was to quiz every function

in Corporate Marketing and ask them to define the biggest

problems they were dealing with in their day-to-day work.

One of the main things that we dug up was both simple

and common to all parts of the organization. Every function

felt the same way. They were frustrated by the fact that they

were not being involved from the ground floor up. Everyone

wanted to be involved earlier in the cycle of work. The late

entries to projects conflicted with their understanding of

the right requirements and deadlines and their agenda. No

one ever had a clear grasp of just how all the part were

supposed to come together.

As a by-product of this effort we discovered one of the

basics of effective change management: if you want to

change your corporate culture, involve all your stake-

holders at a very early stage, and let them have their say in

what’s next. It is much more difficult to engage employees

when they are confronted with a fait accompli. Any change

project should be bottom-up driven and collaborative. The

approach of one person jumping forward and demanding

“From now on we are going to do agile marketing, no

matter what you want or what your challenges are”, will be

sure to end up in disaster.

After weeks and weeks of brainstorming and interviewing all of the stakeholders, our volun-

teer team agreed that the communication and the collaboration between all marketing

stakeholders and the business owners of projects was disconnected and not fluid enough.

We were operating in an environment that was, while hard working and well meaning, siloed

and overtaxed. We needed connectors. Bridge builders. Middle (wo)men, if you will. That’s

how the idea of the Engagement Manager came about. We needed them to weave a strong

web between all the stakeholders in a marketing project.

Before we go any further, it should be noted that we did have great marketing efforts before

we went agile. There is no denying the talent of our experts in each of their functional areas.

And their determination and drive to get things accomplished was second to none. But as we

said in an earlier chapter, we could have adapted faster to certain situations and could have

produced content and assets even more effectively and in a shorter period of time. All of our

marketing efforts could have been more focused and more hard-hitting if we’d limited their

number to a few ‘Wow!’ moments, instead of simply working to produce as much as we could.

And these challenges were only going to become bigger in a world of such an increasingly fast

pace. That is why we decided to tackle all of these issues with an agile marketing approach.

Our concept of the Engagement Manager is partially

inspired by a Scrum Master13 and a Project Manager,

but the engagement manager is truly its own beast.

We like to describe ourselves as the front door to

marketing. Business owners (those needing services), go through that door and together

Let’s all go to the lobby…

we begin our work with them in the lobby (You see, we

promised the lobby was coming back in our story). If they

need our assistance with an ‘engagement’, we will work to

identify just whom from our ‘marketing house’ they require

for their project.

After that, we call every one of the stakeholders of that

particular project, the business owners and all the

marketing experts –our ‘virtual’ team–together for one, big

meeting. The business owner only needs to tell his story

once. Everyone is in on it from the ground floor up and

people can decide about priorities, timing and additional

needs or opportunities together, in terms of the marketing

strategy and the clear outputs. This way we have addressed

the two business problems we described above. It becomes

a unified effort for the Corporate Marketing teams and a

one stop shopping experience for the business owner.

28

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2

When business owners come to our ‘engagement’ office, we first hold a Business

Objectives Meeting (BOM) with them. This is when we outline the objectives and

activities and identify all key stakeholders. We also check if they are really ready for

the project. Because we are not going to bring everyone together to find out that the

business owners are nowhere near to delivering that core message we need to start

the project.

We always try to begin with the basics. We avoid asking “what do you want” (a website,

a folder, a white paper,…) because what business owners initially want is not always

the same as what they need. We dig a little and inquire about their objectives, their

target audience, their budget, their past marketing products,… We act as filters. Some-

times we find out together that the specifics they had in mind initially should be

re-evaluated. That is why the BOMs are so crucial.

In the iterative planning meeting, we gather all the stakeholders in the same room.

That way we ensure upfront participation and understanding for all. We act as advisors,

asking pointed questions if things are not formulated clearly or suggesting things that

seem to have been forgotten. As engagement manager we do not profess to be experts

in ANY of the Corporate Marketing functions but we do act as advocates for all of them.

We want to make sure all the possible bases are covered by asking questions and

challenging teams to think more broadly. At the end of the Iterative Planning meeting

we, as a virtual team also define the sprint sets together, clearly stating the activity

backlog, deliverables, participants and timelines.

Unlike in agile software development, our standups are not conducted daily. We had

The Agile Marketing Methodology–EMC Style

29

to scale them down – again a reality check. We could not afford to require that our

departments or functions–creative or the .com team for instance–had to participate

in 5 or more standup meetings every day. So we try to organize the standups in a

more efficient manner, sometimes merging two of them into one. We do have them

frequently though–about 2 to 3 times a week–because they are essential for the

communication, transparency and accountability of all key players. And, yes, we DO

ask all of those that are in the room to stand up during the entire meeting, although

we cannot vouch for those participating via conference call from other departments

around the world. Standing up forces everyone to keep it short. This is always a chal-

lenge in any meeting as we all know. But forcing the standup actually works.

At the end of each engagement, we offer a demonstration of all the deliverables and

show the connections between the assets. This is an important part to stimulate the

synergy of a team: “Look at what we accomplished together”. Most marketers simply

move on from one project to the next and never celebrate their accomplishments or

see just how it is that THEIR work fit into the bigger picture. Some of them never even

see the end product they had their part in. Being confronted with results–good and

bad– fosters responsibility and job satisfaction.

Testing, measuring and reusing what’s good and cutting out what does not work:

that is also an essential part of agile marketing. After each engagement, we hold

retrospectives, asking ourselves “Did we plan effectively” and “Did we deliver?” so

we can keep refining our process. We look at the data to see what worked, what did

not and why. Only then can we keep improving and innovating.

So what is so special about our engagement managers?

Well, they know our Corporate Marketing department

through and through and are the perfect advocates for

each of the 17 different functions. When Business Owners

come to us, we bring them in contact with the team they

need but we also educate them about innovations they

could benefit from. We might tell them, for instance, about

the short 45-second videos or a ‘fun’ infographic others

have made and which will take best advantage of various

social media tools. Our engagement managers are facilita-

tors and enablers. Their only goal is to make others shine

and be the best they can by really working together and

enriching each other’s experience.

What they are not, though, are project managers, hounding

everyone with their checklists to make sure that everyone

does their job. With a limited number of Engagement

Managers and a multitude of projects and marketing

The engagement manager: tying the marketing network together.

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2efforts, there is simply no time for that. But is goes further

than that. We want to avoid a Big Brother feeling. We

simply refused to add an extra layer of hierarchy and start

checking up on people. That goes against everything that

agile marketing stands for and is against all the latest

organizational trends. We ‘just’ make sure that everyone

works together better and communicates better. We are

there to ‘kill’ miscommunication, mistakes or double work

and help drive better and faster results. And we will never

tell the marketing specialists how to do their jobs. They are

the experts. They know what they are doing. And it is essen-

tial that they feel that we respect that.

Our agile marketing approach allows everyone to be pro-

active and consultative, rather than reactive and passive.

As we said, our marketing experts actually used to be fire-

fighting all the time, with every request coming at them,

of course, being “super-urgent and absolutely essential

for business value”. Our collaborative engagements allow

them the luxury to filter the priorities together, pick the

most valuable projects, work more efficiently and become

proactive, rather than fending people off. That is a great

way to fuel creativity and innovation. It buys them time to

dream up new things and actually do what they do best!

At the very beginning, our colleagues feared that the EMs would complicate things. They

thought that adding an extra stakeholder to the marketing mix would increase the risk of

misunderstandings, mistakes or slower processes. This would indeed have been the case

with ‘sequential collaboration’: where one person does something and then gives it to the

next and that one gives it to the next… That was what collaboration used to be: like a relay

race. But our marketing team, these days, is playing like a football team. We enable ‘simulta-

neous collaboration’: working together in the same place at the same time, keeping an eye on

what the other players are doing and helping each other until a goal is indeed reached. If you

get everyone in the same room together, with one mediator facilitating things, there is no way

that this complicates matters. On the contrary: it makes things so much simpler.

30

31

marketing teams were completely overbooked and over-

worked, a lot of the projects did not get out on time and

quality suffered.

Business in general and marketing specifically are all about

choices. You cannot opt for a quantitative (focus on price

and efficiency) AND a qualitative (customer experience)

value proposition for your business model. It is also impos-

sible to have one product or one message that speaks to

the entire world. 16-year-old girls who love Taylor Swift and

live with their parents in a two bedroom condo do not want

(to hear) the same thing as 59-year-old COOs who listen to

Miles Davis in their Aspen Mansion while sipping on a cup

of Kopi Luwak coffee. So we carefully choose how we will

package our product and what message we will send out

to whom.

Choices are what define us. And that is why we help

business owners and marketing experts choose and prior-

itize 20 projects over the maybe 60 projects they might

have done before. That makes each project all the more

outstanding and innovative. Agile marketing, you see, is

about quality, not quantity.

Simplicity. That is one of the core features of agile marketing,

one of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto, and one of

our favorite ones. The framework and processes we use

for our engagements are deliberately kept simple. We

always use the same steps, as described above. This kind

of ‘automates’ the collaboration and makes it into a habit. You can only break bad habits–

like working in silos and following the same pattern without ever innovating–by ‘overwriting’

them with good ones.

In a way we do this by repeating the simple processes, as described above. This well-oiled

‘automation’ of collaboration, offers our specialists the room and the time to be at their

best: copywriters have more time to write better texts, graphic designers supply the most

surprising visuals and social media gurus develop the most spectacular campaigns. Agile

marketing specifically enables all parties to focus on the activities they do best.

But this simplicity is not only ingrained in our agile marketing processes. It is also how we

decide about the priorities. We make sure that Corporate Marketing does “fewer things

better”. As we noted, our culture used to be very “the more, the better” driven. But if our

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. Confucius

Chinese philosopher

Like taking candy from a baby

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2Simplicity also comes from empowerment. Instead of fostering long and tedious approval

processes involving many tiers all the way up the chain, we trust that our marketing experts

know what they are doing (together). That allows them to react with the least possible delay.

We want to keep that window of opportunity wide open and get our message out there in

time – in essence, striking while the iron is hot. Like when we newsjack an item for our social

media, blog or advertising activities. Newsjacking only

works if it goes fast. Waiting for approval from 6 levels of

management will not cut it. Just keep it simple.

32

Timing is everything!

33

In our agile marke-

ting engagements, we

also advise the stake-

holders not to beat an action to death. If it is 80% ready,

just get it out there when the opportunity is ripe. This, of

course, mainly applies to larger and composite marketing

projects. Some projects, situations or industries are unfit

for this approach. You cannot complete 80% of an airplane

and then try and see if it works. We will also never ask a

copywriter to finish 80% of a blog article and then post it.

It will work in a situation where a website is fully functional

and flawless on the content side, but might for instance

miss two non-essential pages. Or it might in a campaign

for which we have a folder, a website and a social offen-

sive ready, but for which we are still waiting for a longer

white paper. We’ll just get them out there and add the white

paper in the mix later on.

Timing is everything in marketing today. You have to

balance that ‘missing’ 20% against the window of oppor-

tunity, when you can make the biggest bang. Does this

approach scare people? Yes. As we said, it is human nature

to try to get it ‘just right’. It’s just that it’s not always the

best choice in a given circumstance. And even more so if you are working in an environment

of driven employees who often just want to show you how they ‘nailed it’. Be aware of that.

We were agile about our own agile marketing

too. We saw it as an experiment. We first started

to work with a group of volunteers, very much

aware that this was an initiative that might fail.

Once we’d gathered enough information about

the ‘as is’ situation of Corporate Marketing and felt we knew enough about the agile prin-

ciples, we started with just one small bet. We chose one specific project and conducted a

pilot, doing all the things we had learned and trying out different things along the way. And

when that project worked out, we did another one and before we knew it we became ‘official’.

Instead of a volunteer army we built a full time organization with dedicated engagement

managers on staff. And then we started enabling more and more engagements, involving

more and more business owners and marketing experts.

In the (agile) spirit of honesty and transparency, we have to admit that it was a rocky road at

first. As we said, most people tend to get extremely uncomfortable when it comes to change.

We are not kidding when we say it: some of our colleagues actually used to duck away when

they saw us coming in the halls. They feared we were going to tell them how to do their job.

They thought we were going to monitor them or cause them to lose precious time. We were

perceived as “Red Tape”, inhibitors to getting the job done. We were not necessarily the most

popular folks at that point in time.

Timing beatsperfection.

Be agile about your agile marketing

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2

34

It was a blessing that we did a pilot project first so we could show the next ones on the list

that the agile approach worked. And thankfully we had involved everyone from the outset by

asking what their challenges were! Now we could literally ask them “Did you not say that you

were always held up by the other colleagues because they were never transparent about how

they would not meet the deadline, and was this not solved by organizing the 3 transparent

meetings per week?”… People don’t like to be told what to do, because you could just be

selling them hot air if you have no proof of value. You need to be able to show them what you

did and what the results were. That is also why we always have a demonstration at the end of

each engagement meeting. So we can display what was done.

One of the best things to come out of our new

way of marketing was the merging of great minds

working together. Innovation is not just about

the big brainstorms or the high-profile innova-

tion jams focusing on revolutionary inventions. We believe that if you have just the right

people working together, smarter and more closely, they will automatically cross-pollinate

each other’s ideas and innovate. It is like the cross-innovation we talked about earlier, but

within the perimeters of just one organization. Going agile has pushed our marketing team

beyond the utilitarian into innovation. It brings what Peter Drucker said to a whole new level:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic

functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing

is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.

PeterDruckerauthor and management consultant

The EMC agile marketing mission

1. Do fewer things better and more efficiently

2. Enables all parties to focus on

the activities they do best

3. Allows everyone to be proactive and consultative, versus reactive

and passive

4. Facilitates prioritization and allows

everyone to work on (or receive) the

most important items as agreed

upon by all

5. Communication and status trans-parency

6. Accountability is king

The treasure trove of collaboration

35

We already wrote about most of the principles stated in

our mission above, but we just want to elaborate on how

we work on achieving transparency and accountability,

which really are two of the most essential ones of our agile

marketing approach.

Have you noticed

that when you ask

people how they

are, they always tend to answer “Fine” or “Great”, even if

they are not? We call it the corporate nod. And it’s all about

being afraid to say you are not going to meet a require-

ment or a deadline—for whatever reason–and keeping it

to yourself. It is about being ashamed to admit that you are

“failing”. Because whatever outcome other than the one

that was projected up front is a flop in our eyes. It’s natural.

We hit on this already in chapter 1.

The ‘corporate nod’ is a habit that’s very hard to break.

But we think we’ve cracked it to a large extent. One of the

driving forces behind this was that our leadership team

really meant it when they said “If you have an idea, try it. If

it blows up or even smolders to death, that’s ok. You are not

going to get fired”. In such a safe environment all the marketing stakeholders feel comfort-

able enough to tell the truth, and that is crucial in our standups or other meetings. We just

want to take away that crippling fear of failing that is such a big obstacle for not only effi-

ciency, but creativity and innovation as well.

In all of the projects they are involved in, our Engagement Managers want to cultivate the

feeling that “we are all in this together”. They want the stakeholders to feel that they are

not just doing their own thing but are part of a greater whole. Everyone is there on an equal

playing field. No one is more important than the next man. There is no hierarchy. There is

no ‘boss’ on an engagement. Just a bunch of people trying to achieve the best project they

ever did, together. A key feature for achieving this kind of responsibility is peer pressure, of

course. People will just try that little harder in a transparent environment where their efforts

are permanently out in the open. As we said, the tricky part is, of course, not to slide into a

Big Brother environment, governed by command and control.

But the accountability of our marketing stakeholders is not merely driven by peer pressure.

We try to endow our colleagues with a sense of pride and joy about what they have accom-

plished together. That is why we always hold extensive demonstrations at the end of each

engagement. So everyone can see the results. Yes, we do bask together in the golden light

of the successful ones. But we remain critical as well. We have retrospectives too, where we

talk about the lesser outcomes or what could have been done better. So we can learn from

those and get better.

Zapping the corporate nod

Some of the above has, of course, already been discussed

in depth–collaborative, transparent, flexible, empow-

ered, simple, fail/learn and “keep going!” (about the 80%

threshold and get it out there)–so we will just focus on

those that still need a little explanation.

Global, first. EMC is a global company and thus needed

to take this into consideration when going agile. It is not

always easy to juggle collaboration and standups between

stakeholders that work in Boston, California and India.

There are limited timeslots in which we can get together

and, obviously, getting them in the same room will not

work. So we have a mix of ‘live’ standups and conference

calls. But we make it work.

Our Engagement Managers help make sure that every

campaign is ‘global proof’. We always check–before imple-

menting them on all kinds of carriers—whether certain

slogans or visuals are acceptable in certain countries or

cultures. That is, for instance, how we learned we could not

possibly use the bullet train as an image for our ‘Back to the

future’ campaign in China, where there had been a bullet

train accident recently with several casualties. Of course,

situations like that cannot always be predicted in advance.

But through close collaboration with all the international

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2

36

Not only did we formulate a mission for our agile

marketing project, we also defined and documented

a mindset as a guideline for all our efforts. We try to

be social, for one. We share all of our demonstrations

and retrospectives, all of our ‘recipes’ (we, for instance, have some very elaborate roadmaps

for the different kinds of product launches), methods, frameworks, work plans and other best

practices on an online internal community. Every piece of content about every engagement

is 100% open to anybody. We work to find the latest tools and communication methods and

are committed to sharing best practices online. It’s important to have this ingrained in the

DNA of the organization.

Mindset

Social

Collaborative

Transparent

Flexible

Empowered

Global

Simple

Fail/Learn Keep Going!

It’s all in the mind(set)

37

branches, we can try to avoid these things as proactively

as possible. And when we don’t, we just react as quickly

as we can to those kinds of situations, by using the agile

approach.

We are dead serious

about revitalizing

ourselves. We keep

monitoring, measuring

and adjusting our efforts.

After each engagement and together with all the project

stakeholders, we analyze what worked, and what did not.

We use what we call our ‘micro-dashboards’ as a directive

to make sure we discuss everything in detail and never

miss a thing. We talk about how the collaboration went and

what the new insights or innovations were. We discuss if

there was any course correction or issue avoidance. We

tackle how we communicated and where the roadblocks

were. We go over each step carefully together to see what

we can learn and what ought to be changed.

Keep reinventing yourself

We keep measuring and reinventing ourselves

We measure our launches–seeing that those are extra important to us and are managed in

a very thorough manner—differently. We use a ‘fun’ infographic which documents very thor-

oughly the impact of our efforts. It shows the attendance at our virtual events, which were the

most popular breakout sessions, what was the amount of downloads of collateral and which

were the most popular ones, how many of our tweets were shared… All of this is, of course,

intended so we can quickly and clearly see what worked and what did not. So we can readjust

the next time around.

We also organized a focus group with an outside supplier. That way all the engagement

stakeholders could impart, in full anonymity, what they thought about our methodology and

approach. We received some very helpful insights from that and now we are looking into it to

see how we can close the loop on the feedback we received.

Chapter two EM

C Corporate Marketing goes agile: our story

2innovation. So it is our job to be chameleons, to change

when our environment does and come up with fresh ideas.

That is exactly why we take our ‘temperature’ so much with

the retrospectives and the dashboards. That is why we are

currently working on a ‘Chapter 2’ in our agile marketing

project, to define all the things we’ve learned along the

way and what the next steps should be. We keep looking at

what’s next. Being agile marketers, there is no other choice.

So, that was our agile marketing story. We hope that you

found it helpful. We tried to be as honest as possible and

not leave out the hard parts. As we all know, there are no

real hero stories in business, although literature would

have us believe the contrary. Mistakes are made. Thanks

to ’agile’, these will no longer cast a shadow on our reputa-

tion, but teach us and grant us freedom from habits.

We are reminded of this quote by Thomas Edison: “I have

not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”.

The words apply perfectly to the agile mindset. The irony

is that there are so many versions of this quote around and

that only one of them is not actually a mistake.14 If we have

indeed misquoted Edison, we sincerely apologize and we

promise to get it right next time if we learn which one is the

true version. We are good with that.

38

On top of that we now register the accomplishments of our engagement team as a whole. So

we built a quarterly macro-dashboard to self-examine ourselves in the most critical manner.

We tried to keep it as simple as possible, by looking at it in just 5 different dimensions. It

shows–among other things—that we had a 40% increase in engagements from 2012 to 2013,

how many of those were annual, how many and what type of launches we had, how many of

the stakeholders we reached and what kind (Corporate Marketing, sales, business sponsors,

vendors or partners…). And last, but not least, we look at all the innovations in Corporate

Marketing, in our launches, as well as in our engagement methodology.

One of the best innovations in Corporate Marketing that was enabled through agile marketing

was the prestigious Human Face of Big Data project, one of the largest-ever collaborative

events in human history. Millions of people around the world were able to share and compare

their lives by means of a free mobile app. The project triggered a global conversation about

humanity’s new ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize vast amounts of data in

real time.

We try to innovate wherever possible. Over the course of time, we began to look outside of

Corporate Marketing and have brought other EMC departments into the mix. Launches are

a great example of how we step outside the box: we include our partner organizations, our

communication teams and our field teams as full participants ensuring that all key players are

in the game from the beginning.

Do not think, because we allow for experimentation and fast failure or focus on interaction

and collaboration, that ours is a ‘soft’ environment. Our management teams expect us to

continuously reinvent ourselves. One of the core goals of our agile marketing is fostering

39

To conclude: one of the things we love most about agile

marketing is how human it is. Loads of methodologies

or approaches start from some ideal type of character

or mindset that a lot of us simply do not have. Agile is

different. It takes into account all of our basic flaws and bad

habits and tries to act on them in a very simple, process-

driven manner. It is all about taking away the complexities

and making them simple. It knows that we are terrified of

failing and loathe change and tackles that – head on. It

realizes that we like to keep things to ourselves and finds

a loophole for that. Agile is smart. It knows that we are not

perfect and starts from there.

3If you want to make

enemies, try to change something

40

Woodrow Wilson

41

Chapter

The agile marketing starter’s roadmap

3We should be very clear about one thing here. We KNOW how difficult it is to transform. The

truth? Our own agile marketing team is not exactly made up of a group of ‘change-y’ type of

people. Just ask our colleagues. So we wanted to impart some lessons learned and some key

basics before we send you on off into the wilds of Agile Marketing.

It is absolutely crucial that you have executive support for your

agile marketing project. Your executives will be impacted by

the agile approach in more ways than one so it’s necessary to

have them on board. Moreover, their management style will be

an essential enabler (or definite roadblock, depending on the

situation) of the agile methodology.

We cannot repeat it enough (and yes, we did already, many times…): autocratic managers

operating in a unilateral, slow and competitive hierarchical environment will not match up

with the agile marketing concepts. It thrives in a trusting

and sharing environment. It prospers in a flat management

structure that fosters collaboration, and where employees

are empowered to do what they are best at without having

to go through all the layers of the organization to receive

approval.

If your Management is intolerant of failure and demands

that everything is 100% perfect before it is released,

agile marketing might not be the way for you. You cannot

possible expect employees to experiment at will and then

be severely reprimanded each time they get something

wrong.

Ensure executive support

Chapter three The agile marketing starter’s roadm

ap

3If by chance you are dealing with such an environment,

you might want to have a serious conversation with your

management team. It might seem madness to ask Manage-

ment to change their leadership styles, just because

Marketing would like to try out this new little agile trend.

True enough. However, We would like to point out that we

are living in a networked and increasingly flattened envi-

ronment in which only ultra-fluid, collaborative, sharing,

bottom-up driven organizations will thrive. As Jack Welch

once put it: “Change before you have to”.

There is no plug-and-

play formula for the

agile methodology. We

‘marketized’ it to our own

situation, keeping some

things, adapting others or simply leaving them out. For

instance, in the agile development world the Scrum Master

always has someone else lead the standup meeting every

time. This would just have made things more complex in

our environment, so we never used that.

Develop your own method. Don’t just copy ours. It might

As Woodrow Wilson so nicely put it “If you want to

make enemies, try to change something”. Intro-

ducing agile marketing will definitely not make

you popular. In fact, 52% of those surveyed by

VersionOne in its “7th annual state of agile development survey” gave “ability to change

organizational culture” as the biggest barrier to further agile adoption. 12% of them stated

that “company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile value” was the leading cause of

failed agile projects. To make it even scarier: according to the ‘2013 Change and Communica-

tion ROI Study’, only about 55% of all change initiatives meet their original objectives.

not fit your challenges or your company’s culture. First evaluate how your organization is

going about their tasks and document the pain points. Be thorough. Be relentless. If you want

‘agile’ to work for you, you first need to unearth all the flaws in your corporate culture and

existing processes, so you can attack them one by one.

When you have found a method that will work for your type of challenges, be aware that this

too will not be clean-cut and eternal. As your environment evolves, so will your organization

as a whole. Your marketing department will thus need to adjust your agile approach. You

will need to implement all the things you learned through experimentation, failing and

redirecting. Challenge yourself and your team on a permanent basis. There is no such thing

as the perfect agile approach, as it needs to keep evolving all the time by its very nature and

definition.

42

Forewarned is forearmed

Personalize it & keep evolving

43

When you want to introduce culture

changes it is essential that you

start small–like we did, with a pilot

project–and then carry on, step by

step. In fact, this is not just one of

the basics of change, but of ‘agile’ as well: work step by

step, in short cycles and, after every deliverable, re-eval-

uate and change course, if needed.

The good thing about that is, that you only need to really

‘convince’ the first group of the pilot project. They will be

the hardest sell. But once that project is over, and it was

(more or less) a success, the next project will encounter

less resistance. Because you will be able to show what you

have achieved. Results speak so much louder than motiva-

tional words and promises. So always catalogue your proof

points and your successes for further use.

Of course, there is a slight chance that your first pilot

project will fail, possibly even miserably. Be prepared for

that. But do not get discouraged. That too, is ‘agile’. Get

back up on your feet, brush yourself off and try to find out

what exactly went wrong. Measure your mistakes, analyze

their source, learn from that and try to adapt your personal

agile marketing methodology to it.

Agile marketing is not ‘just’ a methodology that you can implement in order to collaborate

better, react faster or become more innovative. It is a fundamental culture shift. According to

Tobias Mayer, author of ‘The People’s Scrum: Agile Ideas for Revolutionary Transformation’,

Scrum is much more about changing the way we think than it is a process.

So, as with every change management project, make sure to involve your stakeholders as

soon as you can, even before formulating the change objectives and the way to get there. In

the collaborative environment that is agile marketing, that’s how you should work anyway. Do

not just ‘throw’ agile marketing at your marketing department. This will just make adapting it

all the more harder.

Startsmall

44

Chapter three The agile marketing starter’s roadm

ap

3Keep communicating every step

of the way. Show your success.

Have your management team

talk about agile marketing at

internal meetings and presentations, even if it is a short

reminder of just one of its core concepts (like the ‘fail fast

& learn’). Use an internal social platform to document all

of your best practices and methodologies. Continuously

‘advertising’ your agile marketing project is crucial if you

want to involve and engage your entire marketing organi-

zation.

And our very last piece of advice: KEEP IT SIMPLE! It is one

of the core components of agile marketing. What you are

trying to do is to ‘simplify’ an increasingly complex envi-

ronment with straightforward processes and collaborative

best practices. Anything that will make your situation more

complex should be avoided at all times. We repeat: KEEP

IT SIMPLE!

Spread the word

Our life is frittered away by detail.

Simplify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreaupoet andessayist

45

ConclusionI hope you enjoyed reading our e-book. I know my team

and I loved writing it, in the spirit of sharing insights and

collaborating with peers.

We actually tried to apply the principles of agile marketing

in writing this book. I sat down with my entire team and we

decided what exactly we would add to it, enriching each

other’s perspectives and particular experiences. We tried to

keep it human as well and be transparent about the pitfalls

and the mistakes we made, in the spirit of ‘practice what

you preach’.

Is this the most perfect booklet you will find about agile

marketing? Probably not. Although we would really like to

believe it is, just like every parent in the world thinks that their child is the most beautiful,

creative or brightest one in the world. (I know mine are.) But we do sincerely believe that we

got it out there at the right time. And the fact that you have made it up to here proves that we

are on the right track.

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my fellow team members for their help with

this e-book as well as all of their innovative work from the inception of this agile marketing

effort. None of this could have succeeded without you:

Steve Colombo, Amy Callahan, Carolyn Cerce, Jill Fitzgerald, Ellen Deutsch

Stay Agile!

David QuinnSenior Director, Corporate Marketing

at EMC Corporation

About

David Quinn

David Quinn has led a variety of marketing functions for EMC in both web marketing and marketing support. In prior lives he managed the

introduction of web properties into Data General Corporation at the leading edge of the internet in the business environment including

one of the first ever business/sales oriented intranet sites. He is currently leading the Engagement Office within EMC’s Corporate

Marketing organization with a crack team that is continually working to define, deploy and refine new methodologies for success within

the marketing organization.

1. Google/Shopper Sciences, The Zero Moment of Truth Macro

Study, U.S., April 2011

2. Who else but Charles Darwin?

3. The idea to apply Nate Silver’s fox & hedgehog simile to agile

marketing, comes from Jim Ewell’s ‘Agile Marketing’ blog.

Read it here, it’s really smart.

4. “Why We’re So Afraid of Change -- And Why That Holds

Businesses Back” on www.forbes.com

5. Charles Duhigg, The Power Of Habit

6. “The 3 Most Dangerous Psychological Barriers to Change”

on http://agilelifestyle.net/

7. This research was never published but incorporated in

“The living company: Habits for survival in a turbulent business

environment”: see the article entitled “The living company:

Habits for survival in a turbulent business environment”

on www.businessweek.com

8. Why Silicon Valley Loves Failures, on http://www.inc.com/

9. The digital universe are the digital bits created, replicated

and consumed in a single year.

10. The digital universe in 2020: Big Data, Bigger Digital

Shadows and Biggest Growth in the Far East, IDC Country

Brief, sponsored by EMC Corporation.

11. Research has revealed that intelligent people have more

efficient connections between their different brain areas.

12. http://www.cross-innovation.eu/practices/manifesto/

13. According to the Scrum software development framework

from agile marketing, the scrum master is a buffer between

the team and any distracting influences

14. From “I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it

wrong” (which is also attributed to Benjamin Franklin in other

versions) to “ …I Have Just Found 10,000 Things That Do Not

Work” or “…I have simply found 999 ways how not to create a

light bulb” and there are still slightly different variations to be

found. Feel free to let me know which the right version is. I’m

actually quite curious.

Chapter

Chapter

Sources1

1.1

1.2

2

Agile Marketing

When clear and simple processes drive innovation