The Lunar New Year is just around the corner – a period where marketers are busy rolling out festive campaigns. The Year of the Ox symbolises one of steadfastness. To achieve this quality, marketers need to be astute and firm in their knowledge of what customers need and want. Setting a marketing budget and strategy at the start of every year may seem like a robust plan, but in the digital era, many assumptions could be overturned very quickly.
As much as it sounds like a paradox, to achieve stability, companies need to practise marketing agility.
In a recent study, Kartik Kalaignanam, Kapil Tulil, Tarun Kushwaha, David Gal, and I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 senior managers on their perspective of marketing agility. Very simply, marketing agility means making sense of the market and then executing plans, and this process occurs in many swift iterations. A real-life example is Singapore Airlines (SIA) which launched its flight-to-nowhere campaign in a bid to reduce losses during the pandemic. When the campaign was criticised by environment advocates, SIA scrapped the plan. Later on, it offered dining experiences on its parked planes, which became wildly popular.
When implemented well, marketing agility has the potential to lead to increased customer satisfaction and better market performance.
Of course, marketing agility is not without its challenges. Firstly, when a brand’s messaging is constantly changing, it could dilute the consistency of the brand’s image. Secondly, marketing agility would also need the support of suppliers and partners. Some suppliers or stores would require advance notice of new product launches. Thirdly, in tapping customer data to make marketing decisions, data privacy concerns may surface. Will the pressure to roll out campaigns quickly lead to unethical employee acts, such as overlooking privacy laws or plagiarism? These are but a few potential issues that managers would need to consider.
Perhaps, marketing agility would work better for some tasks than others. For example, when the cost of developing a product is estimated to be high, marketers can test the waters by revealing some facets of the product. The response from netizens can then be used to fine-tune the product, thereby reducing the risk of launching an unpopular product. Content creation and media buying are also tasks that can benefit from prompt feedback from stakeholders or customers.
In comparison, other tasks that require long-term strategic planning, such as a product’s life cycle or entry into new emerging markets, would do better with traditional planning strategies.
Besides investing in technology that fosters marketing agility, such as data visualisation tools, companies should also place importance on the organisation’s structure and culture. Spotify, for example, has small cross-functional teams called squads that are responsible for a certain component of the product, such as an album’s cover. A few of these related squads would form one tribe, a flexible structure that allows employees from different fields to contribute synergistically to a specific, common cause, such as redesigning the online experience for customers who want to return products.
To promote an agile marketing culture, companies can emphasise values such as teamwork, openness, trust, innovation and the desire to learn. Employees should also not be afraid to fail.
This new year, let agility be the new steadfastness in marketing.