XM – Extreme Marketing

A core precept of Agile marketing is XM, Extreme Marketing.   XM is a philosophy of marketing that pertains to both product development and outbound marketing.

For product development, XM is all about matching up to Extreme Programming (XP) techniques as originally described by Kent Beck (www.extremeprogramming.org).  Extreme Product Marketing (XPM) has several key attributes:

• small incremental developments
• small tight teams including developers, testers, marketing, and customers
• rapid and iterative evaluation of product functionality in an agile way

Extreme Marketing for outbound marketing is similar.  Extreme Outbound Marketing (XOM) is built on the idea that all outbound marketing must and can be measured and refined, repeatedly and rapidly.  It is characterized by:

• up front definition and agreement on measurable metrics
• a metric measurement infrastructure
• rapid testing and measurement
• comparative and iterative testing of marketing messages
• incremental and continuous improvement

Agile Marketing Defined

“Agile Marketing” is an umbrella term for several iterative and incremental marketing methodologies.

While each of the agile methods is unique in its specific approach, they all share a common vision and core values. They all fundamentally incorporate iteration and the continuous feedback that it provides to successively refine and deliver marketing messages and programs. They all involve continuous planning, continuous testing, continuous integration, and other forms of continuous evolution of both the project and it’s market delivery. They are all lightweight (especially compared to major marketing campaign approaches), and inherently adaptable. As important, they all focus on empowering people to collaborate and make decisions together quickly and effectively.