Business agility has become a trending concept in the past decade as a response to the changing business landscape thanks to digital transformation and globalisation.
Business agility refers to business competence to recognise and make fast adjustments to new market conditions and continuously create and promote new values for their stakeholders. Businesses with high levels of agility are believed to be capable of coming up with an effective strategy to deal with changes and gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.
There are several ways for businesses to develop their agility. For example, they can brainstorm and invent new strategies from the inside out using their internal inputs and assets. Additionally, they can also bring about agility using outside processes, gathering and leveraging insights and knowledge from external sources to add new values to their existing products or services.
Eventually, customers are the one who decides the values of the products. Maintaining a clear understanding of customers and their desire and capturing new developments in consumer needs are key to disrupting the current market. In fact, the world’s most innovative companies, such as P&G and Lego, have utilised open innovation to drive their creativity competence.
Expanding to the realm of marketing, marketing agility is considered the extent to which an organisation quickly grasp new changes in the market to adapt their marketing decisions to allow the business to respond effectively to new developments.
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Within this process, the most important stage is sensemaking, during which the organisation navigates through the muddy landscape and uncertainties, connecting the dots and identifying the implications of the new trends in order to establish an understanding and create a strong foundation for further actions. Another pillar of marketing agility is iteration which refers to the circular loop to go back and forth throughout the whole process to learn, unlearn, and relearn the situation and make changes as necessary to the marketing plan.
The linkage between marketing agility and disruptive innovation
Marketing agility is applied to all stages of the marketing process, from consumer surveys, product and service development to the final launch of the promotional campaign and feedback collection to revisit and improve the whole process as needed.
As a result, marketing agility enables the organisation to become more proactive and attentive to customer demands, even in this era of fast-changing customer needs and wants.
Considering its fundamental pillars, marketing agility is often linked to disruptive innovation, which enables firms to bring up new products and services that disrupt the market, significantly improving customer experience, lowering costs, and having the potential to drive out uncompetitive firms and existing incumbents. Disruptive innovation also leverages inside out and outside in the brainstorming process, utilises radical and new technologies, and captures newly emerged trends in the market.
Challenges faced by brands in the age of marketing agility
Nevertheless, some researchers have become concerned about the impact of marketing agility on brand consistency. Specifically, some brands might be strongly associated with certain brand images, and marketing agility, with its emphasis on constant changes and adaptation, might threaten the integrity and consistency of the brand, changing their identity and core values to cater to short-lived consumption trends.
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In fact, leading marketers made the case that by jumping fast on the bandwagon, companies might make the mistake of sacrificing long-term benefits for short-term gains. Consequently, it is crucial to retain the core brand values which are unique to the brand and are what keep customers coming back.
In other words, marketing agility presents a paradox to brand managers. While it helps to drive revenue and growth, at least in the short term, it may damage the brand from a long-term perspective.
Additionally, another difficulty in achieving marketing agility is the high dependence on certain powerful partners and other third-party associations who are not willing to change. For example, if a company’s product is distributed through a third party’s distribution network, the company might depend on the partner’s willingness to accommodate its product changes/modifications to continue the cooperative relationship.
Finally, due to the high interest in marketing agility, which has become one of the hottest buzzwords of the time, many companies are faced with the question of whether they truly adopted the essence of marketing agility or only implemented the concept superficially. When this happens, the changes occurring in the organisation and its associated product and services are not substantiated in the long run, resulting in a waste of organisational resources.
Hence, to effectively lead a truly agile marketing department, the organisation needs to hire the right marketing leaders who possess both soft skills, technical skills, and long-term visions to pursue the right agile strategy.
In sum, within this fast-changing business landscape, remaining agile is crucial to business survival and enhancing innovation capacity. Nonetheless, businesses must consider the shortcomings of being agile for an effective response strategy.
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