The Agile Marketer

Chapter 2The Modern Marketer's Challenge

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.¹

—Peter Drucker

Marketing leaders today face enormous possibilities—and an enormous challenge. Thanks to the rich troves of data now available to them, they see the opportunity to compete on the basis of personalized customer experiences. But they also inhabit a marketing technology landscape that is complex, fragmented, rapidly evolving—in short, overwhelming. This landscape is replete with overlapping technologies, integration challenges, data fragmentation, and technology management that borders on the labyrinthine. Just search for Scott Brinker's marketing technology landscape infographic to see one person's attempt to bring some order to this dizzyingly complex picture. But be prepared to zoom in deep to this almost comically dense graphic. As helpful as it is, it doesn't at all capture the integration points between the technologies.

What the vast breadth of technologies in this cluttered field tells us is that investors have fully bought into the notion that marketing technology can make better customer experiences possible, and will thus drive competition in the future. Indeed, powerful solutions are emerging, solutions that allow us to understand our customers (and potential customers) like never before. Insights from Big Data make it possible, for instance, for Facebook to know when a user is likely to exit a romantic relationship, ...