Agile Marketing Manifesto

Published by Femi Olajiga in Agile Marketing

Agile Marketing Manifesto

Netflix initiated the extinction of an established brand like Blockbuster, who’s next? This is the question that CMOs in non-Agile marketing teams should be asking themselves. It’s not about “if” but when new startups will take over your market share. In the UK, companies like Maplin and Toys R Us have both gone bankrupt, partly due to their reliance on doing the same old, same old and their lack of agility. The top 5 gas and energy companies in the UK keep losing market share to startups on a daily basis. As a result, every industry is prime for disruption. Although it is hard to imagine marketing teams adopting an approach born in the IT industry, this will have to be given serious consideration by CMOs and other top-level marketing professionals. Agile marketing aims to help established brands speed up their responsiveness to change.

The Agile Manifesto initiated the birth of the Agile movement in the IT Industry. In February 2001, the Agile Manifesto was created and signed by:

  1. Kent Beck
  2. Mike Beedle (RIP)
  3. Arie van Bennekum
  4. Alistair Cockburn
  5. Ward Cunningham
  6. Martin Fowler
  7. Robert C. Martin
  8. Steve Mellor
  9. Dave Thomas
  10. James Grenning
  11. Jim Highsmith
  12. Andrew Hunt
  13. Ron Jeffries
  14. Jon Kern
  15. Brian Marick
  16. Ken Schwaber
  17. Jeff Sutherland

In this piece, I plan to discuss the interpretation of the 2001 Agile manifesto in the context of marketing. I will also discuss the limitations and criticism of the original Manifesto, as well as the 2012 Agile Marketing Manifesto which is a subtle copy of the original 2001 Agile Manifesto. It looks generic and must be further developed to align with marketing. Over the years, there has been some criticism of the Agile manifesto which I will discuss as part of the four sections listed below. To avoid buzzwords and technical jargon, I will summarise the key points from both Manifestos under four key themes:

  1. Communication and Interaction
  2. Processes and Tools
  3. Customer Collaboration
  4. Working in Iterations

Communication and Interactions

The core of Agile focuses on effective communication between individuals. According to the manifesto, face to face communication is a very important prerequisite for effective teamwork. Why do people in the same office communicate via email only? As a manager, is your face-to-face communication with your direct reports limited to the weekly 1-2-1’s? This is one extreme and the other extreme is the assumption that remote working is bad. Does your company allow you to work from home sometimes?

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation.

What creates the difference between face-to-face and virtual communication is the absence of nonverbal cues. Used in the right context, teleconferencing tools can provide a platform for effective communication between individuals working remotely. One of my criticisms of the Agile manifesto is its lack of emphasis on culture and team structure. The Agile Manifesto was written by 17 white men which points to the lack of diversity and appreciation of ways in which people with different backgrounds operate. The emphasis on face-to-face communication and collocated teams was based on the societal and business context in 2001, a time when very few teleconferencing tools existed. It’s easy to recommend face-to-face communication over virtual, but how does it impact employee behaviour, exactly? In my experience of working in B2B, B2C, collocated and virtual teams, team culture takes precedence over structure. While I agree with the importance of communication, the mix of diverse behaviours and personalities within the team will determine the effectiveness of different ways of communication that the team adopts.

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”

This is the first value in the Agile Manifesto and the most important one to the context of marketing. The question that should be asked is “How does a distributed team embrace face-to-face interaction over processes and tools?”. A few years ago, I was part of a global Agile marketing team with members in Germany, UK, Asia and North America. It was impossible to communicate face-to-face due to the difference in time zones so we relied heavily of teleconferencing tools. We understood that video conferencing (compared to emails) was a better means of communication. In essence, we embraced processes and tools over individuals and interactions.

How are you adapting your communication methods m to the structure of your team? I don’t believe having every member of a team collocated in the same office necessarily guarantees better communication and interactions. Individuals on the team will connect based on shared objectives and values, not just the quality and quantity of the interactions. Clarity of purpose and leadership style is also an important factor that contributes to team communication. Leaders that encourage backbiting and gossip within their team are basically using communication to create a toxic work environment. Leaders that foster open communication and transparency within their teams reap the business rewards.

As marketers, how do we build on the concepts and recommendations of the 2001 Agile manifesto? I ask this because Agile teams in the software industry are project teams by default, which is different to how marketing operates. Scrum teams are assembled to comprise skilled individuals in order to deliver working software in iterations. This is the reason why the Agile manifesto places so much emphasis on face-to-face communication. For IT teams, face to face communication is important to create rapport with new team members, who come and go based on the requirements of the project. How does this apply to marketing? The natural structure of marketing teams creates communication gaps and silos between individuals in these teams. What we need is more than just face-to-face communication, it is alignment and defined communication processes that clarify role dependencies. For example, if you ask anyone within a digital marketing team about their interaction or communication with the folks responsible for offline marketing, chances are they wouldn’t have had many – in reality (and as counterintuitive as it sounds) these two strands of marketing don’t usually ‘talk’ to each other.

 

The organizational chart above is an example of the structure of a typical in-house marketing team. For the SEO Executive to communicate with someone in PPC from the agency side, he/she normally has to go through the line manager. In most instances, the communication path goes upwards, then sideways and then downwards. As the image above indicates, bureaucracy is a major hindrance to Agile marketing. How can marketing improve team communication? Some experts recommend moving away from the hierarchical to the flat organizational structure. For me, changing the structure alone will not guarantee improved communication and team collaboration, because you cannot force people to change unless they buy into your initiative. Therefore, you need a compelling team (or organizational) idea.

Processes and Tools

You can start the analysis of your processes and tools by deliberating on the questions below:

  1. What collection of tools do your teams use to communicate?
  2. Do your communication tools encourage individual and team conflicts?
  3. How do leaders and managers communicate to the broader group?

Team structures can create silos which are further exacerbated by siloed communication tools. The tools used for 1-2-1 communication are different from those used for inter- and intra-team communication. Although the primary aim of using these tools is to promote collaboration, more often than not they start creating unnecessary distractions and disruptions to the team flow. A typical marketing team will use most of the tools listed below:

  1. Email
  2. Company intranet
  3. Skype for business (Private and group chat)
  4. Discussion Forum (Slack or Yammer)
  5. Internal blogs and wikis
  6. Workplace by Facebook
  7. Microsoft Teams
  8. Atlassian
  9. Online Task Management Tools (Kanban boards)
  10. Internal file sharing applications

How does your team task align with your marketing strategy? The default mode is (usually) as follows: you go to work, log into your computer and wait for a random task to be thrown your way – you often don’t have the overview of how that task fits within the ‘bigger picture’. Having defined task execution processes is better than adopting a firefighting approach. This is one of the most important benefits of applying Agile frameworks in marketing.

To deal with bureaucracy, some experts will recommend switching from a hierarchical to a flat structure, as if that is some sort of magic solution that will solve all your problems. What they fail to understand is that, although this can be quite helpful in some situations, it does not solve everything: pure changing of structures will not magically improve processes. Redesigning all of the organizational processes is about tackling behaviours that stop people from collaborating. There is no silver bullet to how you improve the internal processes of your marketing team, rather, you should be thinking about how you can structure your team to create accountability and collective decision making, as well as how your internal tools influence your team’s processes and ways of working?

Customer Collaboration

Research shows that over 60% of software produced by IT Agile teams is not used by the end customers. Why is it that Agile teams in software keep producing irrelevant features? The Waterfall vs Agile argumental ways hinges on customer feedback. Agile experts accuse waterfall of being rigid and non-responsive to changes in customer requirements. While this is true to some extent, there is a lot of change that happens after product launch. Customer expectations are always changing and it can be difficult to maintain customer satisfaction.

As a marketer, how does collaboration with customers inform your strategy? We can all agree that profiling customers through analytics tools alone does not help, because if it did Maplin and Toys R Us would still be around. The key questions for any marketer are:

  • How are we adjusting our activities to the feedback we get from customers?
  • Do we even gather feedback? If not – why not, and how can we start to do this to inform our broader marketing strategy?

Working in Iterations

The concept of iterations aims to encourage continuous updating of the marketing strategy. What I have found is that a lot of content about Agile marketing advocates for working in sprints. In my experience, sprints work as a product development approach, but it is too rigid for marketing teams. What is interesting about feedback from analytics is that it is often ignored, until the very end of the process. As you think about working in iterations, start prompting for how your analytics insights can trigger specific action. A big UK brand recently announced a merger with one of its competitors in a bid to increase its market share, however, the issue of losing existing customers to new startups will not be resolved by the merger alone.

Conclusion

One of the things I like to highlight when talking about Agile marketing is that the original Agile manifesto was created to solve problems facing software developers.  Therefore, for me, the primary goal of the Agile marketing manifesto must be addressing the following :

  1. Creating a safe space for people to work
  2. A focus on satisfying the customers
  3. Eliminating unnecessary meetings
  4. Creating a customer feedback loop to inform strategy.

In future post, I will be discussing:

  1. Agile marketing plan
  2. Agile Marketing Examples and Casestudies