Agile Marketing: Why A Marketing Revolution Is A Must

Agile Marketing: 
Top 10 Reasons A Marketing Revolution Is A Must
Wrote this post just before organizers of what is sure to be the beginnings of a new marketing (Jim Ewel and John Cass) generously asked if I would be part of their Agile Marketing panel at the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco.

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Why A Marketing Revolution Is A Must
After suggesting we need to "storm the barricades" at Internet Marketing Summit yesterday thought I needed to follow up with thoughts on why creating a marketing revolution is important. This post is not the Cluetrain Manifesto, but thoughts on where and why marketers may have lost our way along with ideas for how to pick up the scenttrail and find our way home :).

1. We marketers are in danger of speaking to ourselves about ourselves; we’ve lost our way.

2. As I write this TOOLS not PEOPLE, VALUES, EMOTIONS, or HEART seem cool and sexy. Like fish, the shinny lure, the next tool, and the next promise hypnotize us.

3. TOOLS are agnostic and should be fitted to form, function and needs because tools are NOT an end unto themselves. Tools serve us not the other way around.

4. Tools and machines have “requirements”, people have PAIN, LOVE and CARE (Empathy).

5. No one now or will ever love a tool; we love the new US tools enable.

6. Marketing is now and always has been about LOVE, but we’ve lost our way hypnotized by the same shinny things that are catch many fish now.

7. People buy (join or contribute) with EMOTION and justify their decisions with logic so marketing is a synergy of right brain creativity and left-brain engineering pragmatism.

8. Much like tools, marketing isn’t an end unto itself; great marketing is created in service of some greater idea, some greater object, purpose or art. The implication means sustainably great marketing can’t be greater than the thing itself. If marketing is what is remembered then the thing itself, what we are marketing, isn’t sustainable.

9. People don’t buy brands or products anymore, they join them so marketing is a form of enlistment with stories as our stock in trade, stories are how marketers touch hearts and then convince minds to develop the advocacy necessary to thrive.

10. Our human desire is to belong to something bigger, more important and rewarding then our solitary existence. Our genes make our lives about adventure and our desire to help is manifest. Every life is a journey, so marketing, at its core, is about a hero’s journey and the tribe created in support of the hero's mission.

Join the revolution by LIKING Agile Marketing's Facebook page, stop by Jim's AgileMarketing.net site and becoming part of the 1% of people who will read this note and contribute comments, Tweets and ideas (not that there is anything wrong with the rest of the 1:10:89 rule :).

If you are ready for a new marketing revolution raise your fist, stand up and let's change Internet marketing today and the world of marketing tomorrow.

Marty
Director Marketing
Atlantic BT
Raleigh, NC