Hacking Marketing

23Platform Thinking and Pace Layering for Marketing

Everything is connected.

That's probably true in a broad spiritual or metaphysical sense. But it's absolutely true in marketing—and in software architecture, for that matter. What a customer experiences at one marketing touchpoint influences his or her expectations and perception of your brand at subsequent touchpoints. Behind the scenes, processes and priorities in one area of marketing have ripple effects on other areas, whether it's a subtle and diffuse impact on the company's culture or a concrete trade-off in budget allocation.

The bonds between any two components of marketing may be strong or weak, direct or indirect. But changes in one will affect the other, in small or large ways, quickly or over time.

Although this has always been true, digital dynamics have multiplied and magnified these effects. The number of external touchpoints and internal moving parts in marketing's ecosystem has grown geometrically in recent years. Digital adjacency makes the bonds between previously dispersed pieces stronger and more direct. Digital speed and adaptability accelerate the rate of change. And digital scale amplifies their impact on the business.

If this sounds like it can easily become a tangled mess, you're right.

For example, a supposedly harmless upgrade to your website might contain a bug that inadvertently changes the Web locations, or uniform resource locators (URLs), of several key pieces of content. This might drop your ...