Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative Hardcover – March 21, 2016

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!

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!

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.