With the world adopting an agile way of working, marketers are wondering; what does this mean for me and marketing as a whole?
What does it mean to be an agile marketer, or an agile marketing department?
How does this play out?
5. Marketing today
Marketing professionals deliver the best possible customer experiences across multiple touchpoints through a seamless customer journey. With that being said, they do this by using the latest marketing technology, including methodologies such as Lean Startup, design sprints, Scrum, Kanban, A/B testing, and growth hacking.
Continuously learning and adapting to stay relevant will create value for customers and companies.
One could conclude, marketing is Agile by nature and ready for the future. But, is that really true?
4. Challenges
Marketing professionals face an unprecedented environment of rapid and continuous change in technology driven disruption, market circumstances, customer expectations, decreasing company and product lifecycles and global competition. Can we tackle these challenges by adopting an agile way of working within a marketing department or do we need to change fundamentally?
3. The role
The role of marketer can be described as follows:
As a marketer, I want to offer the best possible customer experience in a fast, flexible, efficient and innovative way, so that customers stay, spend and share your brand.
Nevertheless, marketers cannot do this alone. Thus, they need the entire organisation to actively work towards the goal of improving the customer experience, which results in both the organisation and customer sharing your brand. It is believed that “everybody impacts the customer’s experience”; marketing, management, finance, HR, legal and IT.
2. Future way of working
In order to really deliver world-class customer experience, we need to completely change the organisation as a whole, which entails breaking down silos to leave behind command and control management thinking.
This creates a business model which is based on close and continuous collaboration across all disciplines!
That is where agile, as it was defined in 2001, comes in; collaborating and communicating to continuously satisfy the customer in meeting his / her needs.
1. Your thoughts
So, while an agile way of working in marketing is present and has value, agile marketing by itself is not enough to truly serve the people who determine the future of our organization.
We need to discuss and define what the role of marketing is within an adaptable and customer obsessed organisation!
I have my thoughts, but would love to hear yours. Feel free to share this article with your thoughts on social media and tag @Wemanity.
In future blog posts I will share my thoughts on:
· Why does marketing lead the customer centric business transformation?
· What are the 4 stages of customer obsession?
· How do agile values, principles and methodologies create better patron experiences?
