Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative (published by Wiley)

My goal was to help marketers at all levels — even those with no technical background or inclination — adapt marketing management to the wild and wonderful whirlwind of a world now dominated by software.

My underlying thesis: as marketing becomes more and more entangled in software — as everything becomes more and more digital — the art of managing marketing increasingly resembles the art of managing software.

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

For most people, that probably sounds a little strange. After all, marketers and software developers have historically been on opposite ends of the career spectrum.

But when you realize that marketers are now paddling water up to their chins in websites (software), analytics (software), social media (software), marketing automation (software), interactive content (software), mobile apps (software), and so on, it starts to seem obvious. Software has eaten the world — and marketing too.

And this is actually a really good thing.

Software gives us the potential to innovate and scale marketing in highly agile ways that defy the conventional laws of gravity as we knew them in the classical marketing universe.

But it’s like the leap from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics — the “rules” of what’s possible are different and can feel a little counterintuitive. To effectively harness the digital forces of software, we must not only innovate what we produce in marketing, but innovate how we produce it too.

If this sounds intriguing to you, you can download the introduction, table of contents, and first chapter of Hacking Marketing as a free PDF.

Harvard Business Review: Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist

Harvard Business Review: Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist

I wrote an article in collaboration with Laura McLellan, The Rise of the Chief Marketing Technologist, that was featured in the July-August 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, part of their spotlight focus on “the new marketing organization.”

It describes the basic framework of the role and the forces that are motivating the growth of hybrid marketing/technology executives, and it also provides short vignettes of five real-world marketing technologists.

Here are several of the amazing marketing leaders — many of my heros — who graciously reviewed Hacking Marketing and offered these remarks:

“Hacking Marketing provides a brilliant road map on how to evolve the capability and culture of marketing practices using parallels from the most disruptive industry in the world, the software industry.”
Ram Krishnan SVP & CMO, PepsiCo
“Hacking Marketing not only creates a compelling model for how to think about the intersection of marketing and our digital world, it helped me re-think the way I approach my role as a CMO.”
John L. Kennedy CMO, Xerox Corporation
“Marketing success is based on the experience it delivers, and now Scott Brinker lays out a terrific manifesto about how to rethink the operations underlying it”
David C. Edelman Principal, McKinsey & Company
“A must-read operating manual for CMOs who want to lead in the digital age.”
Ajay AgarwalManaging Director, Bain Capital Ventures
“An original take on how the management of marketing must transform to keep pace with our increasingly digital world.”
Ann Handley Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs
“An inspiring read for anyone who wants to master the art and science of modern marketing management.”
Mayur GuptaSVP and Head of Digital, Healthgrades
“Scott shows how great marketing management today is closer to modern software development than the marketing of yesterday and helps marketers understand how to incorporate those principles to succeed.”
Rishi DaveCMO, Dun & Bradstreet

Other Venues, Blogs, and Websites I’ve Contributed To

I contributed a chapter to the book Multi-channel Marketing Ecosystems, edited by Markus Stahlberg and Ville Maila.

As part of their promotion for the book, the publisher has agreed to let me distribute a PDF of my chapter that discusses software as the new fabric of marketing — Software-driven marketing ROI. Click the previous link or the image to the right to download your free copy (no registration required).

Others have also covered my evangelism of this subject, including: