Agile Marketing

Unlock Adaptive and Data-driven Marketing for Long-term Success

Neil Perkin

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781398605107
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781398605114
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

Create and apply responsive and adaptive marketing principles and practices with this guide to redesigning marketing structures, processes and culture, to be fit for purpose in today's changeable environment.

Agile Marketing is an essential and practical roadmap to transforming your marketing by applying agile principles at scale and overcoming mindset and culture challenges to enable greater efficiency and quicker response times. Covering areas such as putting data and automation at the centre of agility, measuring success and creating and maintaining space for innovation, it features a range of invaluable frameworks, practical guidance and insightful examples from organizations such as Dell and Pepsi.

Written by a recognized agile expert and marketing thought-leader who has worked with marketing teams in some of the largest global organizations, Agile Marketing also explores how to empower high-performing marketing teams and develop and pivot agile campaigns and content. Featuring tips and tools throughout and a step-by-step agile marketing transformation blueprint, it is a crucial resource for creating effective and streamlined marketing today and into the future.

Part One

The agile marketing opportunity

01

Marketing in the digital age

Changing marketing – how the 4 Ps are evolving

Marketing can often be obsessed by the shiny and the new. Sometimes this can be helpful since it can help us to challenge our assumptions, focus on innovation and find new ways to engage customers and achieve our objectives. Yet it can also be unhelpful when we forget the fundamentals of marketing strategy and practice in our rush to embrace the latest technology trend or fad. Digital technologies have revolutionized multiple industries, business models, customer behaviour and routes to market. It has disrupted incumbent businesses, rewired the way in which entire markets operate and changed competitive environments for good. It has empowered consumers in ways that were unimaginable 30 years ago. Now, everyone with a smartphone has the answer to just about any question right there at their fingertips.

Yet great marketing is still great marketing. Among all this change the core fundamental elements of marketing have not changed. According to the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM):

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.¹

Let’s break that definition down. As a process, marketing is a way of generating value from and organizing activities around customers and their needs. In his classic book The Practice of Management Peter Drucker famously declares:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation… Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.²

This process revolves around identifying customer needs, which is based on research, observation and insight. Marketing has always placed the customer at its heart, has long been the voice of the customer in business and enabled the organization to focus its activities to generate customer value. Marketing brings customer orientation to the company. Marketing also anticipates customer needs by spotting opportunities and gaps, meaning that it can be customer led but also customer leading. It’s also concerned with satisfying customer needs, which means having a clear, customer-focused purpose for products and services and executing that purpose in ways that deliver to and exceed customer expectations. The final part of this definition is profitability which is, of course, about serving the needs of the business. To paraphrase American marketing theorist Richard Bagozzi, marketing is an organized system of exchange – the business gains revenue, profit or some other gain in exchange for the benefits that are provided to customers by the product or service.³ However, the context for how we deliver these essential elements has changed. And changed dramatically. From a fragmentation of channels and touchpoints to a revolution in the role that data and technology plays in the discipline, to powerful shifts in customer experiences, targeting and measurement. Digital has changed how we identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs. It has changed the way in which we derive benefit and profit through new models and new ways of understanding the value and return of the activity we are delivering.

The impact of these long-term shifts has been compounded by rapidly changing, increasingly complex and uncertain environments. Many organizations were undergoing significant digital transformations in response to the need to rapidly digitize capability and become more agile and responsive to changing contexts. The COVID-19 pandemic served to dramatically increase this requirement for transformation as consumers moved rapidly to online channels and companies struggled to adapt to swiftly evolving customer behaviour. McKinsey research has shown that between the start of the pandemic in December 2019 and July 2020 the average share of customer interactions that are digital grew from 36 per cent to 58 per cent globally. This triggered a rapid acceleration in digitization with the number of propositions, products and services that were partially or fully digital growing from 35 per cent to 55 per cent over the same period.⁴ Respondents to the survey were three times more likely than before the crisis to say that at least 80 per cent of their customer interactions are digital in nature. A survey of 2,500 enterprise decision-makers from around the world by cloud communications platform Twilio found that 97 per cent of respondents believed the pandemic sped up their company’s digital transformation and that it had accelerated companies’ digital communications strategy by an average of six years.⁵ Data from digital, marketing and e-commerce specialist Econsultancy and Adobe revealed that a majority of businesses in their research (63 per cent for B2C and 57 per cent for B2B) had seen unusual growth in digital customers but also that around half of companies had seen unusual buying behaviour from existing customers.⁶ The McKinsey survey also showed that the largest changes (including changing customer needs and requirements) were also the most likely to stick through the recovery period.

With such significant change it has become essential for marketers to respond with greater agility and adaptability to these shifts in both customer behaviour and expectation. And yet while expertise, roles, the use of technology and elements of practice have evolved, my argument in this book is that much around the structure, process and mindsets that marketing teams deploy to execute marketing strategy and realize objectives has not fully kept pace with this change. This book is not about challenging or rehashing classic marketing theory. It is instead a pragmatic view on how marketing teams can apply key principles and practice from methodologies that have grown up with digital to facilitate greater responsiveness and adaptability. It is about how data can be placed right at the heart of marketing practice to support better decision-making, continuous iteration and optimization. It is about marketing execution that is fit for purpose for a rapidly changing world.

But first, let’s begin with what’s NOT changing.

What’s not changing

I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’… I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two, because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.⁷

This quote from Jeff Bezos speaks to the importance of paying attention to fundamental customer needs that largely don’t change over time. In Amazon’s case this might be low prices, ease of purchase, fast delivery and a huge range of products to select from. This, he says, enables a business to be truly exceptional at what is fundamentally important and focus on long-term success and not just short-term profit.

There is much around classic marketing theory and practice that has not changed. The importance of marketing strategy and positioning, and of understanding the market, competitive propositions and how this can shape objectives. The importance of insight into customer needs, motivations and behaviours and how these can shape our segmentation of customers, the identification of who we want to target and the messaging that we want to use. The significance of brand and how this creates disproportionate value for organizations. The need to combine brand building with sales activation. The value that comes from creativity. The need to integrate, plan and measure activity against clear goals. The need to optimize the mix of our activity to ensure the best possible returns. All these things are just as important now as they have ever been.

Taking this into marketing communication, marketing and advertising strategist Tom Roach has defined seven key principles of effectiveness that will always be true, since they relate to the fundamentals of not just marcomms, but how the human brain works.⁸ These are a good reminder of essential principles that don’t change:

1. Reach: Research has consistently shown that brand growth is driven by new and light buyers in the category. In his seminal marketing book How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp demonstrates that brands succeed through building mental and physical availability and through reaching new customers, which means reach is fundamental.⁹
2. Attention: Reach is of little use if you can’t then gain attention from customers and prospects. This means standing out, earning attention and cutting through all the noise.
3. Creativity: Work by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising in the UK and by Peter Field has shown that creativity is a powerful driver of sales and profitability.¹⁰ More powerful than media and targeting.
4. Distinctiveness: Distinctive brand assets can help create the memory structures that help customers to recall your brand in buying situations. US ad executive Rosser Reeves famously argued as long ago as the early 1960s that marketing communication should display a unique proposition (a USP), but research by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science has shown that brand distinctiveness (standing out with impact through assets like name, colours, messaging) is a more effective driver of impact than brand differentiation (setting yourself apart from the competition). In order to be chosen, brands need to come to mind easily.¹¹
5. Consistency: It’s not enough to just be distinctive. Brands need to be consistently distinctive. Roach references an analysis of 1,500 cam...

Table of contents

• Part One The agile marketing opportunity
• 01 Marketing in the digital age
• 02 Defining agile marketing: what it is, and what it’s not
• 03 Agile process and principles
• Part Two Agile marketing strategy
• 04 Understanding context and situational awareness
• 05 Adaptive strategy
• Part Three Agile marketing execution
• 06 Using sprints
• 07 Applying methodology to marketing execution
• Part Four Scaling agile marketing
• 08 Agile marketing structures
• 09 Agile marketing at scale
• 10 Agile resourcing
• Part Five Agility from data
• 11 Why data is the foundation of agile
• 12 Learning well with data
• Part Six Agile marketing culture and leadership
• 13 What is agile culture in marketing?
• 14 A culture of exploration
• 15 Empowering high-performing marketing teams
• Part Seven The agile marketing transformation
• 16 Conclusion
• Index