On Agile Marketing

I’ve been writing and consulting about organisational agility for over fifteen years now (amongst other things of course) and there is probably one consistent misinterpretation in the application of agile principles at scale which I see more than any other – the idea that it is a one-size-fits-all solution. This is annoying.

I see this a lot in various guises right across businesses but it’s particularly prevalent in marketing teams and seemingly in much of the advice on the topic which has come from the big consultancies (who seemed to jump on to ‘agile at scale’ as the latest marketing transformation revenue generator before moving on to GenAI).

I strongly believe that agility has only become more needed and more important over the last decade and this is especially true within the marketing function. The shift towards always on, content-at-scale, technology and data empowered marketing requires a solid foundation and knowledge of the fundamentals of good marketing practice combined with new levels of agility in operations and deployment.

But I also believe that there is no silver bullet, no quick fixes, and no singular way of applying agile principles. Every sector, business and marketing team has unique contexts which require a nuanced approach to understanding how working practices and structures should evolve to become more agile. What works for a bank will not work for a retailer, will not work for a CPG, will not work for a telco.

Unfortunately I’ve seen and heard of a number of examples where it seems to be seen as the answer to everything, or as something that should be adopted in place of all previous methods and ways of working. One example of this is the surprisingly common instance of the big consultancy that comes in and advises the CMO that the entire team needs to shift to agile methodologies and structures.

This leads to a lot of misunderstanding and misapplication. It ends up being seen as a software process that has been misappropriated for marketing. It creates issues with dependencies across the team and business. It can leave people feeling overwhelmed and confused, trying to force strict agile methodologies and timescales onto tasks or outcomes that are still best done in a more linear way.

The first mistake is that agile should work for everyone. The second mistake is that we get too lost in the methodology (or there is no sensible nuance applied to the methods to account for business realities or peculiarities) and that we forget that at a fundamental level it is the culture and behaviour that enables a new way of working. I’ve literally written the book on Agile Marketing but in that book I was keen to stress the need for contextual understanding in the application of its principles.

At a fundamental level there is a big difference between BEING agile and DOING Agile. Whilst everyone on the team can learn about being agile, it’s highly likely that not everyone will need to (or should) do Agile (small ‘a’ and big ‘A’ agile). There are contexts, outcomes and jobs-to-be-done, which can absolutely benefit from a shift to agile ways of working and methods, but trying to force everything into a two week sprint cycle is not helpful.

Yet there are still so many useful principles, mindsets and ways of working that can be taken from agile thinking and embedded into working processes – genuinely customer back working, adaptability, working to outcomes, breaking down significant goals into smaller elements to enable easy reprioritisation, tying strategy tightly to execution, combining alignment with autonomy, baking continuous improvement and data-informed decisioning into the fabric of how you’re working. I could go on.

So the next time someone from a big consultancy tells you that your entire team needs to shift to agile methodologies and structures tell them that I said they are being ridiculous. And of course, if you did want a more nuanced understanding of how to apply agile principles at scale my book is here (see what I did there).

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