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.
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
