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

Hacking Marketing provides a conceptual framework for adjusting to -- and ideally succeeding in -- a rapidly-evolving digital marketing landscape. I’ve found it tremendously helpful, not just as I’ve sought to develop and refine my own thinking, but for helping to establish a shared set of concepts and terminology for my team. In the software-as-a-service business that we run, we need our marketing efforts to be as lean, as innovative, and as adaptive as our software. And this book gives us a series of ideas that are at once powerful and eminently pragmatic. I particularly love the idea of taking an experimental approach to marketing. However, I will admit to finding the practice considerably more difficult than the concept. A/B testing of, e.g., landing pages has become commonplace, and we have likewise found ways to introduce randomness into other marketing efforts such that we can potentially learn something about their true effects. So far so good. But gathering the data we need to learn what we need to learn from experiments: that has turned out to be surprisingly challenging. One variation of a landing page, for example, might be particularly good at getting people to click through to a website or even sign up for a free trial. But what if that population of visitors/sign-ups is significantly less likely to convert to a paid subscription? It’s not enough to experiment with landing pages and scale up those that generate the most clicks or the most sign-ups. You need to know something more about the populations for whom different landing pages work, and about the long-run revenues and costs that might come from those populations. Capturing good data on metrics of success that truly matter can be incredibly difficult in practice. At our company, we’re building out a custom Force.com system to help us track experiments through to eventual revenue and other metrics of success. It’s complicated, since we have to track not only who was exposed to what experiments, but also how our relationships with those users developed. When sales cycles are long and involve multiple people and even multiple organizations, tracking attribution is tricky, and it involves a lot of legwork on our part. But without that legwork, we simply don't end up with the data we need to properly learn from the experiments we conduct. Hacking Marketing has given us an extremely useful conceptual framework, plus a whole slew of practical management ideas for how to put that framework into practice. This has then allowed me and my company to focus on sorting out the actual experiment->data->learning part. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there!

An important book detailing how the spirit of software development has infused modern marketing. Brinker makes a strong case for how markets need to constantly iterate to survive in the new world that is not digital marketing but marketing in a digital world. It is definitely worth reading, but be aware that the core of this 230 page book mostly deals with tactical issues for working with your team in this new environment -- these sections are not for everyone.

Hacking Marketing was an excellent primer to understanding how marketing management has evolved with the digital age. Scott Brinker does a great job in explaining the similarities and differences that marketing and software companies have implemented for management. As a young marketer working in a software company, I found a lot of inspiration in this book that helped me understand and pitch new concepts to make my company grow. Concepts of agility, interactive marketing, and working in sprints was all stuff that made sense with Moore's Law of "the speed and capability of our computers to increase every couple of years." It's a practical guidebook on how to manage a marketing team that I think would be a great read for everyone from those just starting out in marketing, to seasoned professionals looking for ways to grow. Look forward to more insight from Brinker in the future.

Didn’t have any expectation from this book. But at the end was okay. Maybe few chapters were interesting, other not so really!

Scott Brinker's "Hacking Marketing" should be required reading for anyone who calls him/herself a marketer. There is no other marketing professional more qualified to write this book than Brinker (@ChiefMarTec). He is truly thriving at the intersection of marketing and technology, and his annual MarTech landscape hangs in offices around the world. As a thought leader, I've always admired Brinker, and now his book serves as a guide for scaling my team and my own professional development. It was validating to see some of his practices for agile marketing were already in place with my marketing team, such as a daily standup where we list the 3 major accomplishments from the day before and the 3 big things we would do today. The biggest "wake up" moment I had reading this book is acknowledging that as a modern marketer, I myself am a software developer. I'd always liked the idea of becoming a "full stack marketer" and Brinker has given me marching orders to get there.

Hacking Marketing is about hacking business, or more accurately, hacking organizations. Scott Brinker creates a clear imperative for leaders in any function to embrace and apply simple principles to solve complex problems. This book is for everyone—whether in marketing, education, government, human resources, operations, or most any field. Personally and professionally, I found this book to be a long-needed therapy session, especially in how Scott introduces reasons for writing it on page 18: ”The time and expense for making website changes are almost all a function of human and organizational factors—while the costs of distributing them on the Web are, technically speaking, close to zero... This will be a recurring theme: how can we reduce unnecessary organizational constraints to take maximum advantage of digital malleability." Scott covers agile (traditionally from the software engineering discipline) applied to numerous functions. For example, while we have come to accept that technical feasibility exists in most every part of our lives, it's the agile sprints that create ‘organizational’ flexibility. For maximum efficacy, share this book with your colleagues, people inside your company, and your partners and peers. You’ll thank me for it!

This is the first I've read about digitally savvy marketing management and I'm thrilled. Great read, new sources of thought and nicely organized. Thanks!

Scott, credited with bringing marketing technology (MarTech) to the forefront, has led the charge on how CMOs can adapt by forming a chorus from the chaos in modern marketing. In Hacking Marketing, he explores how marketing leaders can adapt their teams to increase their agility and 'metabolism' - focusing and executing the most impactful projects as efficiently as possible. He also dives into the evolution of marketing from simple communications to the design and delivery of experiences. In other words, how we as consumers in any industry have a greater need for an interactive engagement with our brands. I appreciate that he borrows from various other disciplines and tactics including growth management, rapid software development, and customer experience. These mindsets and methodologies are what we worked to change in our executive and operational marketing management clients before we deployed any new marketing technology. If you are a marketing leader working through the struggles of managing multiple projects and initiatives to deliver meaningful results, this is the book for you.

Eu tive contato com o trabalho de Scott Brinker primeiro por seu site (chiefmartec.com), e depois soube que ele tinha lançado este livro. O site já era uma amostra mais que suficiente da capacidade do autor de ligar o marketing tradicional com a tecnologia, criando pontes que tornam o marketing mais ágil, responsivo e produtivo. Para quem já conhece esse trabalho, Hacking Marketing é um bom guia de campo: em poucas páginas, o autor vai traçando paralelos entre metodologias de desenvolvimento de software, como Scrum e Kanban, com a gestão do marketing. Partindo de pequenas ações de marketing, onde é mais fácil aplicar o agile, ele chega até os grandes planejamentos de marketing, que se beneficiam igualmente dessas metodologias. Todos os paralelos são ilustrados com exemplos e complementos, que ajudam a idéia a "encaixar" na gestão de marketing. Ao chegar no final do livro, não somente você se sentirá informado, mas energizado a repensar como você organiza seus projetos de marketing dentro de sua empresa, encaixando a rapidez dos meios digitais em uma metodologia de trabalho que vai dar tração suficiente para evitar o descompasso. Se você quer entender como ter uma grande vantagem sobre seus competidores, Hacking Marketing é o manual de sobrevivência.

Scritto in maniera chiara e diretta. Non annoia, un ottimo libro consigliato a tutti quelli che cercano nuovi metodi efficaci per realizzare le strategie di marketing

Modernes Marketing Engineering mit Methoden der Softwareentwicklung. Pflichtlecktüre für alle Marketer im 21 Jahrhundert

A ver no es la boooooomba pero la verdad es que está muy bien, te habla de cómo aplicar la metodología Agile a departamentos de marketing. Está guapo.

Scott has a very simple yet powerful idea: if marketing is increasingly technology defined, marketing functions will increasingly resemble software / online services firms. Customer offer development in the software / online market is normally based upon "agile" and therefore marketing needs to borrow and adapt agile practices from the software industry. It is a compelling proposition, well presented, well argued and well worth reading.