Posted on Apr 1, 2013

The Value of Agility in Marketing

The value of agility means moving quickly and lightly in a graceful manner; nimbleness.

Marketing Questions:

What incentives are in place for your team to want to be more agile?
When responding to market demands, what’s your biggest barrier to making changes quickly?
How much do the individuals in your organization appreciate each other?
If you had 48 hours to make a major change to what you offered the market, including pricing, promotion, and distribution, who would you put on your SWAT team?
What clues do you use to know when to take action and when to wait?

Shifting from Average to Agile

Marketing used to be semi-predictable: address the 4 P’s of marketing (product, price, place, promotion) and spend your money on mass advertising. This was normal, typical, regular marketing. And most of the time it led to marketing results that were… average.

Now marketers live in a new world where there is just one rule: ”change is constant.” It’s difficult to make any predictions. Success comes from learning to adapt – quickly.

So, many marketers are embracing the value of agility. In fact, there is a growing trend around the concept of Agile Marketing.

A recent article on MarketingProfs.com highlighted Five Advantages of Agile Marketing:

Focusing on customers. It’s about adopting Robert Lauterborn’s 4 C’s marketing model (customer, cost, communication, convenience).
Working together. It’s about removing silos and bridging departments to work more effectively together.
Tracking leads. It’s about being responsive to trends in a way that generates leads.
Data-driven decisions. It’s about using data, testing and tracking to drive marketing decisions.
Failing forward. It’s about being willing to experiment, adapt, and learn from failures.

Now, being agile is not the same as simply moving faster. Maybe you’re familiar with the age-old sayings: “Haste makes waste” or “We never have enough time to do it right the first time. But we always seem to have enough time to do it over again.” Agility doesn’t remove the need to be careful and attentive. It actually enhances it.