Agile marketing gets talked about a lot these days. A lot of people seem to think that it is just about being fast and flexible in marketing. And it is, but it’s also much more. It is a very process-driven manner to push proactivity and innovation in marketing. It represents the perfect merger between the agile methodologies that come from the realms of software development and the creatively innovative field of marketing.
The agile methodology was a reaction to the traditional waterfall approach in the software development world. It was called that because the process actually cascaded sequentially from one stage to another. A waterfall project would start with – as a first step – the careful gathering of requirements. Then architects would map out the design. Then the developers would begin implementation. Then it would go on to verification, delivery, and maintenance forever after. It was a silo-ed approach that had to deal with several challenges such as slowness, heightened risk levels, inefficient administration, over-formal communication etc. Actions took a tremendous amount of time to be finished and by the time they were completed, they were already outdated. Or they left the client furious because the developers had misinterpreted the requirements and activities had not been traced properly. Similarly, marketing today is suffering from too much rigid planning, results that take up too much time because of the dictatorship of ‘perfection’ and a rather stove-piped way of working.
So the marriage between agile and marketing is a match made in heaven. The agile development methodology installs processes to counter this rigidity, slowness and disconnectedness and be able to work or react fast. It is a clean cut method that has a strong focus on close collaboration, transparent communication and intelligence sharing. It works in small steps, with the permanent delivery of small chunks of results. It centers on continuous measuring and according permanent adaptation. It follows the processes of the agile Scrum framework with maximum 4 week iterations and daily 15 minute stand-up meetings.
One of my favorite parts of agile marketing though is how it concentrates so much on permanent observation, measuring and consequent adaptation. Because in an ever more complex world that is characterized by VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – it will not do to just wait and see if the marketing efforts will eventually translate themselves in sales. By then it will be too late. It is quite simple. You múst know the market and your customer if you want to react to them correctly. But they change so fast that you have to monitor and follow them continuously in order to really know them. This is the age of real-time. Anything else slower than that, promises to end up in a disaster on the long term.
If you want your marketing to be really agile, having its experts work closely together and with other departments like IT will surely help … but not as much as the use of smart technology that will allow you to evolve along with your industry and stay on top of it.
An example. You need to be able to launch a new product page on your website and test what customers are looking at first, if they are clicking on what you want them to and if they are actually buying after that. You should be able to monitor quickly if having the buy button on the left works better than having it on the right. You certainly require more sophisticated technology that allows your online corporate magazines to offer different content as customers read along. The proposed content should depend on what they have clicked on on previous pages. You also need a tool that can tell you what your customers are saying about you on the social media so you can take intelligent measures in all situations, for example in case of a crisis.
I’ll give you one of my favorite examples of agile marketing to conclude: the French company Bouygues Télécom – Free’s biggest competitor – launched a large promo campaign about its ADSL offering. Just 1 hour later, Free activated a cheaper counter offer. It had carefully analysed up front how low it could afford to go in such a case and had already prepared all the promotions in the system, so it could react fast if it would happen. They even had a press release ready stating “we were only more expensive than the cheapest one for one hour”. Talk about agility, and great visibility. Such speed and digital savviness will make the market more ruthless than ever, of course. Companies with slow marketing, slow research, slow market analysis and the inability to react and innovate fast are in very big trouble if they take no measures.
Hopefully you aren’t part of them?
Michaël Deheneffe is CRM Consulting Director at Business & Decision
