All Marketing Needs to be Agile Now—Getting Started
As we all come to grips with what Covid-19 means for our daily lives, it’s important for marketers to recognize that consumer mindsets are shifting regularly.
Just use yourself as a barometer. Now put yourself into your customer’s shoes. Of course, each business, brand, and product category will be different, but what’s not different is the fact that consumer mindsets will be shifting regularly as we adjust to new realities. For a brand and its marketing, don’t think that one review and pass at adjusting your plans will do the trick. During this time, say the next 12 to 24 months, it’s going to take constant adjustment.
For this reason, if you haven’t applied Agile Marketing to your business and brands, you should think about adopting some of its philosophies now.
Being agile is really rooted in the idea of responding to the market and your consumer’s needs more quickly as they change and as you learn.
Start by being present to and getting rooted in your consumer and their needs and mindset.
Consider starting a weekly or monthly tracker. Don’t just do quantitative research; it won’t give you all you need. Plan on regularly connecting with consumers through qualitative research to fully understand the why behind behaviors, mindsets, and so on, giving you the richness of understanding you’ll need to speak to them in a relevant and meaningful way. It will help you keep a regular pulse on what’s important to them in the moment.
With that said, it’s also important to do some foresight work.
Start to frame out at a high-level what you think multiple, different horizons of consumer communication might look like. Through either your own research or through secondary research, gain an understanding of what you think the new normal will look like over time. What are the different scenarios that will relate to different stages of managing through the pandemic? How does your brand fit into those scenarios and how will it connect to your consumers’ mindset during each of those times?
In setting up an agile marketing organization (more often related to digital marketing practices), McKinsey provides a good primer on structures that should be put in place.
A few takeaways that apply now:
Clear goals – Know what you are trying to achieve (e.g., maintain subscribers, build brand meaning, stabilize transaction values).
Decision systems – Make roles and decision-making responsibilities absolutely clear to enable speed.
Measurement systems – Know how you will measure results for different campaigns and tactics. What are your barometers for making changes or staying the course?
Tight, small teams – Form small teams with focused objectives. Test with one agile team first for learning before scaling to more teams.
Support functions – Ensure all functions have time to support agile teams that need to move more quickly to expedite efforts (think legal).
Leadership buy-in – Make sure the leadership team is bought-in to this approach.
Dashboards and KPI’s – Set-up a simplified dashboard so teams can report up and out, but not be slowed down by unnecessary analysis.
In terms of marketing execution and getting the work done and out the door:
Keep the consumer front and center – As we noted at the start, keep a regular pulse on the consumer and understand their mindset at each stage in the customer journey.
Adopt a “sprint” mindset – Execute in short cycles that are planned, built, measured and evaluated.
Hold daily stand-ups and weekly reviews – Ensure the team is reacting to the latest information by holding daily, short, stand-up meetings. Hold weekly post-mortems to review the data and KPI’s and gain an understanding of what’s working, what’s not, and how you need to adjust your message and executions based on the insights from your consumer research.
Have a prioritized list of tests and ideas – Keep a running list of prioritized ideas that you will want to test in coming weeks and continually add to the list as new insights are learned.
In today’s environment, applying agile practices to your entire marketing mix, not just digital marketing, will be necessary.
With our world and consumers attitudes and behaviors in flux during this time, marketing plans will need to be continually evaluated and evolved to adjust accordingly. Adopting agile approaches can help you do just that.
Sources:
https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2019/10/07/agile-marketing-what-it-means-practice
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