What is Marketing Agility?

 Marketing Agility

COVID-19 pandemic offered very dynamic environment for all the businesses. Of late we have been hearing about marketing agility. Pandemic has speed up to be agile organization. It’s not easy to transform suddenly from traditional marketing processes to agile marketing processes. The challenge become more tough when there is no concrete definition of marketing agility. Everybody has their own fragmentary view about marketing agility. Nevertheless, there are few ones available around us. For example, research team of AMA (American Marketing Association) comprises of Kartik Kalaignanam, Kapil R. Tuli, Tarun Kushwaha , Leonard Lee, and David Gal; defines marketing agility as:

“the extent to which an entity rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the market”.

If we carefully analyse this definition, we can understand that it has following components:

Ø  Rapid iterations

Ø  Making sense

Ø  Rapid execution of marketing decisions

Rapid iterations

Iterations here means rapidly refining marketing decisions to fine tune to dynamic market situation. This may be a viral video or a tweet describing consumer experience about your products or services. If something is getting viral and related to you, you cannot remain silent. You have to act immediately. Respond immediately. There will be diverse reactions on your response. You need to again respond quickly on those diverse reactions. It’s easier said than done. Its indeed stressful. There is no master key to do this. You need to be agile in your thinking.

Making sense

You will be bombarded by huge data. diversified reactions, confusing and contradicting responses. You have to quickly make sense out of it and respond. Fortunately, we have some tools like trend analysis at our hand which help us to rapidly comprehend the situation. Sensemaking is your response to an unforeseen and abstruse situation. One must note here that the response not necessarily be correct. It may prove wrong. However, responding is important.

Rapid execution of marketing decisions

Once you have taken decision, speed in execution plays a vital role. This has two implications; a) it prevent the further damage; and, b) it prevents the competitors to invade your pie. To realise this you need have agile marketing team. Making the team agile pose greater challenges. It starts from identifying required skills. Since, there is yet no widely accepted definition of marketing agility, this identification become more difficulty.

Conclusion: 

Currently there is no widely accepted dentition available for marketing agility. Everyone has their own perception about marketing agility. However, mostly all agrees that marketing agility is how quickly you respond to dynamic marketing environment.

Acknowledgement:

This article is based on the research work titled ‘Marketing Agility: The Concept, Antecedents, and a Research Agenda’ by Kartik Kalaignanam , Kapil R. Tuli, Tarun Kushwaha , Leonard Lee, and David Gal. This paper is published in Journal of Marketing, 2021, Vol. 85(1) 35-58

 

 

Narendra Modi & Rahul Gandhi together defeated Exit Polls in 2014 elections!!!

Loksabha 2014 election results are out .. its a clean sweep .... Mr. Narendra Modi and his team has won with unexpected numbers. Congratulations to him and his team. The whole credit goes to Mr. Narendra Modi, whoes relentless efforts has bring this historical win to BJP and NDA. This is also win for first political brand MODI and it successful marketing. This results also underlined the reach and importance of social media. Undoubtedly social media has reached to remote rural areas of India. Social media has proved its strength once again.

Now its time to analyse the performance of exit poll results. In my previous post I wrote it would be interesting to compare actual results with predictions; based on exit poll survey. Just to remind, all research agencies have claimed 3-4% error in their predictions. Now lets see what they predicted and actual result are..

Channel wise % difference in projected and actual results 

Above chart shows channel wise difference (in%) in projected and actual results. From above chart it is clear that none of the channels' projections are near to actual results. Difference is lowest in predictions of 'News 24' while highest in 'Times Now'. 

Comparison of projected (average of all channels) and actual results
Note: Figures are based on results+leads data at 9.30pm on 16/05/2014 

In above chart I compared average of all exit poll results with actual results. It again shows there is huge difference in exit polls results and actual results.

This is third consecutive time exit poll surveys failed to predict results. In 2004 and 2009 they overestimated NDA and underestimated others. The only difference is in order in 2014 election exit polls results. This time they underestimated NDA and overestimated UPA.

What went wrong?

Exit poll surveys scored hattrick of failure. You may wonder if similar exit polls can predict fairly accurate in US, then why not in India?

As I wrote in my previous post, it is sampling method which is causing this blunder. Unfortunately research agencies including Nielson are not ready to appreciate this fact. The huge deviation (positive and/or negative) clearly indicates that whatever samples selected were not truly representing Indian voters. Researching agencies are not ready to share their methodology, hence it is difficulty to comment on their appropriateness. However variation in exit polls results among agencies shows that they are using different methods.

What next?

Researching agencies need to adopt appropriate sampling methods so that the can map attitude of voters accurately (5% error is acceptable). But beyond this; puts question mark on credibility of exit polls. Agencies should be more responsible and committed to provide accurate results other wise people will loose faith on such surveys.

2014 Loksabha Elections India - Exit Poll results: are they creditable?

2014 Loksabha Elections- Exit Poll results: are they creditable?

Narendra Modi...... Next PM???

2004 & 2009 exit poll survey failed measurably. What would be fate of 2014 exit poll result?How reliable they are?

You will surprise to know that exit polls in fact predict vote share and not number of seats. However media never talk about vote share. Further research methodology used also decides accuracy of result. 

Few interesting facts about exit polls

1. True Representative Samples are crucial for accuracy. One of the major reasons for faulty results in past was improper methods used for sampling.

2. Indian population is diversified (heterogeneous) which makes sampling highly challenging.

3. Research agencies claims 3-4% error in results. Even 1% vote share on an average in India amounts for 10000 votes. This margin is more than enough to deviate the results highly from predictions based on vote share.

4. Different research agencies use different methodology hence differ in predictions. Which is observed in 2014 exit poll results too.

It would be interesting to compare the predictions against actual results on 16th May 2014.

by Prof. Swapnil Undale (Faculty of Research Methodology at MIT School of Management, Pune,India)