Agile marketing and marketing agility

In our current times of multiple crises at one moment, with strong impact on many socioeconomic factors it has become a critical success factor for companies to be resilient and adaptive in their behaviors and business practices. Agile and agility is considered a veritable solution in order to act crisis-proof in an increasingly dynamic and complex environment and has consistently established itself as a new management approach in recent years. Agile approaches are also finding their way into the field of marketing and the Agile Marketing movement driven out of corporate practice has formed in the USA and from there spreading over the world.

Only a modern and agile marketing organization is able to create future-orientated marketing.

Agile Marketing / Marketing Agility What?

Started in 2012 and bringing the mindset of the Agile software manifesto the world of marketing the Agile Marketing Manifesto was recently reshaped for modern poly-crisis world, giving the marketeers orientations and a value foundation for future-proof marketing activities.

1. Focusing on customer value and business outcomes over activity and outputs
2. Delivering value early and often over waiting for perfection
3. Learning through experiments and data over opinions and conventions
4. Cross-functional collaboration over silos and hierarchies
5. Responding to change over following a static plan

What is marketing agility?

Marketing Agility on the other hand is term from marketing science and is defined as the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market.

Research based evidence for bringing marketing agility to your company

In my MBA time at the Danube business school I conducted a research paper with the goal to explore in more depth the phenomenon of agile marketing in a more practical way and to give a concrete recommendation for companies. For that I surveyed large multi-national enterprises that successfully implemented agile practices in their marketing teams. The results show that agility primarily affects the processes of marketing management through its own mindset, the appropriate agile processes and routines and ultimately in a complementary, appropriate organizational structure.

In a proposed impact model, the influences and modes of action to create an Agile Marketing capability in a company could be shown.

How to bring it to life in my organization?

Work on the three underlying pillars to shape an Agile Marketing Capability:

• Mindset – the Agile Marketing manifesto gives great base for a new value structure in marketing teams, but should be also customized and enhanced with existing valuable points in the organization.
• Processes – Agile frameworks like Scrum or Kanban give baseline how to operate in an Agile mode, but need to be adapted for usage in marketing teams.
• Organizational structures – working in silos with all the negative effects is the usual state in ours enterprises. Make the customer- or product centric view of your organization the default one, not the present functional and hierarchical structure.

Sounds like a huge transformation? Start with simple practices and changes in the team’s mindset:

• Hold a daily meeting planning the tasks ahead and resolving conflicts.
• Implement a retrospective meeting after every finished project.
• Encourage experiments and do not punish or demonize failures.
• Setup cross-functional collaboration between teams or departments.
• Start to see the world through your customers or end-users eyes.