Era of Agile Marketing and Oreo

The pace of marketing has changed with more direct pressure to demonstrate its contribution to the bottom line. Various channels of communication are available to reach increasingly fragmented audiences, and all of this must be done with scarce and expensive talent and resources. Despite all this change, many of the core processes of marketing remain unchanged.

The market is pressured to get more done with scarce resources, and to adapt rapidly to change. They responded with a set of principles and a methodology called agile development. Agile marketing is an iterative and experimental approach to marketing that values adaptability and responsiveness to change over long-term planning. It also values individuals and two-way marketing interactions, as well as collaboration among the various marketing disciplines. There are six core values of agile marketing.

Agile marketing recognizes the value in speed to market and encourages an iterative approach. Agile marketers realize that there isn’t just a market for a product, but many individuals who make individual buying decisions. Buyers make their decisions as the result of conversations, not through traditional one-way advertising. Agile marketers seek to foster those conversations, and provide an individualized buying experience.

Agile marketing is a mind-set: Marketers who practice agile marketing put the customer experience at the centre of everything they do. In this era of specialization, it is tempting to organize marketing departments around skill sets: PR, advertising, social media, etc. But to the buyer, the product or the company is the product or the company, regardless of the medium used for communication. Collaboration is necessary to ensure not only consistency of message, but also a user experience that is consistent and pleasing. Teams that collaborate also get more done.

The prior step for change in planning process is to admit that the priorities are in a state of constant change and to throw out those tools which give a false sense of security about the amount of control the business have over that change. Agile marketing is about aligning marketing with the business and sales goals of the organization, getting stuff done quickly and documenting the results with transparency and accountability. Scrum is a formal methodology that can help the business revise its priorities.

Scrum starts with the marketing backlog, which is basically the list of all the potential activities that marketing could do. The marketing backlog could be seen as the “wish list”. Unlike scrum for agile software development, most marketers break the tasks into manageable chunks

Adopting an agile methodology forces to break the old patterns as a catalyst for learning to think differently. One of the main benefits of adopting agile marketing is that it shines a bright light to dispel the misunderstandings. With agile marketing, the task board shows the prioritized list of what the marketing team is working on for the sprint. At the sprint planning session, the marketing team meets with executive management and sales for 30-60 minutes to hear about the current business and sales priorities, adding any new items that come up into the marketing backlog. The team then prioritizes work off the marketing backlog, accepting enough work to fill the length of the sprint (usually 2-4 weeks of work).

Once the team has 2-4 weeks’ worth of prioritized activities, they go to work. This 2-4 week period of getting things done is known as the sprint. When the sprint is finished, the sprint review is held. Executive management and sales are invited, and the marketing team reviews the results of the sprint. For software developers, the sprint review is a time to demo working software. For marketers, new marketing materials are handed out or shown, new websites are demonstrated and the results of any mini-campaigns are shared. The sprint review provides a degree of accountability and transparency.

The sprint retrospective is a short internal meeting of the marketing team to talk about what worked and what didn’t work during the last sprint. It allows for adjustments to the process and methodologies used by the team over time.

Hence it can be concluded that agile processes and tools are actually install mechanisms for culture with an improved visibility dynamics. By requesting people to work together in certain ways, track specific metrics and check in with each other at specified intervals, companies can put in place the building blocks to measure the performance.

Here comes one tough cookie

So Oreo have devised the correct environment in which to deliver truly agile marketing campaigns.

They hit the headlines of agile marketing during the 34 minute blackout in the last Super Bowl, tweeting, “You can still dunk in the dark”. 

The result of which was retweeted more than 15,000 times within 14 hours.

In total, Oreo has well and truly signed up to the creative direction and now has a catalogue of great examples around popular discussion topics online - typically using Twitter as its vehicle.

*Not in any particular order (except maybe the last one).

Mars Rover landing

National Cheesecake Day

 

National Elvis Week 

Gay Pride

Dark Knight Rises movie launch

Giant panda baby 

And most recently, the birth of HRH Prince George of Cambridge just last week

And just to prove Oreo has agile at its core, AMC theatre's quick response to Oreo's tweet was equally as cooly replied to. Note: all tweets in the thread actually received more RTs and favouriting than possibly expected from the initial post.