This IDC study provides an overview of agile marketing — the application of agile development principles to the marketing environment. Agile marketing is a high-communication, low-documentation, rapid iteration process designed to provide more frequent, more relevant, and highly measurable marketing programs.

Agile marketing is characterized by:

• Frequent, rapid iterations
• Frequent, brief meeting
• Process transparency
• Interaction, rather than documentation
• Distributed decision making

This document examines the benefits and weaknesses of agile marketing, explains why this framework is gathering traction now, and examines how to determine if agile marketing is right for your organization. Also included are agile marketing case studies featuring Novell, HubSpot, and Webtrends.

"The Agile approach to project management holds promise for solving the problem of obsolescence in marketing," according to Gerry Murray, research manager, IDC CMO Advisory Service. "It can enable marketing teams to quickly deliver on high-priority requirements and effectively fight fire drills. It also provides good opportunities for a variety of people to take leadership roles and conditions the marketing team to a disciplined, measured approach to project management."