I frequently get asked “How do I build my budget for marketing if I’m practicing Agile Marketing? Finance is asking me for an annual budget; how do I give them numbers if I don’t know what I’m doing beyond the next one or two sprints?”
No matter where or what, there are makers, takers and fakers
-Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
For too long marketers have been, or have been seen as, fakers and takers, not makers.
Television has brought us Mad Men: fakers who create alternate realities, where family life is as wholesome and happy as slides projected from a Kodak carousel and where all the women are buxom blonds in silver shorts, high heels and a Maidenform bra. In their reality, the Mad Men sleep around, drink like fish and ignore their families. This is the marketer as image maker, telling fake stories with little basis in reality.
I often get asked about writing Agile Marketing user stories and how they differ from developer user stories. I’ve written about it before in a two-part post on User Stories here and here. But I don’t think I’ve provided enough detail or examples, and I’d like to fix that.
I’m going to use Microsoft SQL Server as an example of a business-to-business (B2B) product. It’s a product that I’m somewhat familiar with, as I ran SQL Server marketing back in the late nineties. I’ll then walk through, step by step, the process of generating Agile Marketing User Stories for SQL Server to illustrate the process.
I was skimming a page of brand marketing firm PureMatter, when this paragraph jumped out at me:
I just finished reading Brian Massey’s Your Customer Creation Equation and I liked it and recommend it, but not for the reasons I expected.
I was pre-disposed to like this book. On the cover, Brian Massey refers to himself as “The Conversion Scientist” and he has the lab coat to prove it.
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