What do the fastest growing companies in the world have in common? Testing and iterating on those tests, shutting down the ones that don’t provide lift and overinvesting in the ones that do. That’s how Amazon can go from selling $0 in private label clothing to being the #2 retail brand in the world in less than a year.

Agile is simply the most efficient way of testing & learning. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a brand strategy and it doesn’t mean you can’t have an ultimate set of goals in mind, but if you think that having all the answers to the test before you go-to-market than I’m afraid there will be some challenging days ahead as the pace of change and level of complexity in the world increases.

No one is rejecting it as a whole. Sam explicitly says “agile can be useful in search engine optimisation, direct response and customer support.”

I’m just following it up with, how much more value does agile add to someone’s marketing efforts?

Treating the misuse of a concept as the rationale to reject the concept as a whole strikes me as rash. If after everything you’ve read and seen, you adamantly don’t think agile is applicable to the marketing profession, then I won’t try to talk you out of that worldview in a comment thread.

You talk about agile from a theoretical perspective, but that doesn’t fix the abuse, and you don’t align it with the promotional mix. Sam makes a point that it can end up being detrimental to companies who employ it. Can you show it’s value or ROI from a marketing perspective?

I don’t see how “Agile management is not a strategy. Agile is an instrument of strategy.” seems to invalidate his point. It’s eye roll inducing and doesn’t change the facts.

How does agile fit into the marketing channels, and how much more value does it provide over traditional processes?