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Flock Forum: Agile Marketing and Innovation

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team member

Florian Voigt

Flock were delighted with the turn-out for our Agile Marketing Forum last week.

We had a fantastic panel:

  • Alex Petrogiannis/ Marketing Director Craft Gin Club
  • John Clarke/ EVP Publishing at SEGA Europe
  • Barnaby Dawe / Chief Customer Officer at Pret A Manger
  • Andrew Cocker/ Senior Director, Global Brand & Innovation Expedia Group

and a lively debate around the challenges and opportunities of Agile Marketing.

For most panel members, Agile Marketing Operations are a natural way of working; however, the way the methodology is applied varies from business to business.

Agreement on the benefits were around:

  • Speed to market
  • Higher productivity
  • Measurable success
  • Collaboration & teamwork
  • Agile Marketing can be more fun and more rewarding than much of the politics driven “old style” decision making

The most important watch outs are:

  • An agile company culture is critical for Agile Marketing to thrive
  • Importance of a clear business strategy and brand guidelines at the heart of the process for decision making
  • There needs to be buy-in “from the top” to make the changes that agile demands – i.e. small, cross-functional teams working in sprints
  • Testing is core to Agile Marketing, you need to expect 1/3rd of tests to fail, 1/3rd of tests to succeed and 1/3rd of tests to be inclusive
  • Agile needs great processes, great KPI’s, and a discipline to make it work (even when the discipline is to allow flexibility)
  • Agile Marketing can be successfully applied to “Bricks and Mortar” and “old media” businesses, as well as new

The audience included marketers from L’Oreal, Uber, McCormick, amongst many others, and we experienced a lively debate around how to manage a high number of tests and how learnings are captured and used for future projects.

If done right, the iterative cycles of agile campaigns guarantee that lessons learned from previous attempts are applied to the next. This keeps your campaigns competitive and improves not only the creative output but also continuously improves your return on investment.

Host of the evening, Flock Founder and CEO, Simon Francis commented: “Agile marketing is very much a buzz right now, but it was so great to hear from leading proponents of Agile Marketing to really understand what it means, how hard it is, but also some of the benefits. Working with so many agile marketers like our panelists has given us a great point of view of the topic, and it was great to share it with our Flock guests”

Besides the panel discussion, the evening was a great opportunity to socialise, make new friends, and to discuss the critical topics surrounding effective marketing transformation, whilst enjoying a variety of craft gins – courtesy of Craft Gin Club, our sponsor of the event.

If you would like to discuss marketing transformation solutions in the area of Marketing Operations, or any of our practice areas including Marketing Strategy, Procurement, Capability or Marketing Technology, get in touch.

Contact: Julie Marshall