Ishtihaar || AGILE MARKETING – quick and effective

In today’s world with technology growing at a brisk pace, no business plan or business strategy is perpetual. With the introduction of new, small but audacious firms having a dynamic approach to their business the big behemoths are under threat of revising their business strategies periodically. A new business term “agile strategy” is becoming a buzz word in the corporate world which is revolutionising the orthodox thinking of various businesses and their modus operandi. Customers today are becoming very peculiar to their needs and are not ready to compromise on their existing options. They are more inclined towards the individualised tweak of the product and the entire campaign by a company starts revolving around the individual needs of a consumer and hence the agile marketing which takes care of the two way interaction with the customers and use their existing limited resources in the best possible way to cater to the largest number of the consumer base. The orthodox methodology involves designing a mass campaign for a large consumer base and be indifferent to the individual requirements of a consumer. This perception of the marketers requires to be changed and agile marketing plays a handy role in doing so by reaching out to each individual customer and trying to provide them the highest levels of satisfaction.

The very first step in agile marketing is to use existing resources to satiate consumer needs in the best possible way. Most of the other marketing concepts remain the same adapting to the changing demands of consumers.

Agile marketing revolves around needs of a consumer. As the needs of the consumer and the experience of the customers in buying and using the product becomes a decisive factor for a company while designing their advertisement campaign the priorities for a marketer begins to change with the trend from the existing and robust strategies. It all works on aligning marketing with the business and sales goals of the organisation along with doing the job at a brisk pace and then documenting the results with transparency and a lot of accountability.

In agile marketing, a company starts with the marketing backlogs which is the list of all the potential activities which a company can do. The backlogs go on to become the “wish list” for the company and they have to work hard to fulfil this wish list. Unlike agile marketing other strategies break the target into various minute pieces and tries to achieve them sporadically.

The first help which a company gets by adopting agile marketing is to break the jinx of thinking in a traditional fashion and start thinking on new lines. The biggest advantage of agile marketing is that it reduces any misunderstanding between marketers and consumers. In agile marketing, the marketing team meets with the “executive management for sales” for 30-60 minutes & then decide upon what are they working on and sets up a new priority. The team tries to add new ideas to the backlog (wish list) and starts working on the same as soon as possible. The duration of this work is 2-4 weeks.

This duration of 2-4 weeks is called a “sprint”, after the sprint is over a review team is called upon which comprises of the executive management and the sales personnel who take a call on the work of the sprint team and different thoughts are shared at the same platform following which remarks are given. The entire review system is done in order to keep the sense of transparency and accountability intact. The review for such a sprint becomes important as it clarifies how the priorities work and what all new fundamentals are to be added for the future in order to make such a sprint successful.

For the marketing team it becomes very important to have a fair knowledge of the customers’ requirements and their take on the products or the services offered. In this short span (sprint) of 2-4 weeks the marketers are the best judge to understand the ongoing trend. Thereafter a decision is made regarding the existing marketing strategies and what all changes in the strategies and the priorities can be brought about, in order to cater to their consumers in the best possible way with the existing limited resources.

There have been many instances when a company’s marketing wing came out with a new technology and the marketing campaign for the same, for a very small period of time and tried to gauge the thinking of consumers thereby trying to build upon the genuine responses received from their customers.  

So, for a company, big or small, “Agile Marketing” is effective.