Marketing agility in action: Marketing professionals’ experiences on agile practices

Abstract

This thesis explores marketing professionals’ experiences on agile way of working with the ambition of generating insights for the thesis’ target organization for future development purposes. The aim was to understand how agile practices support marketing practitioners’ work, as well as learn about the benefits and challenges related to agile way of working in marketing context. The target organization operates across Nordics and works with both business-to- consumer and business-to-business marketing communication assignments. The theoretical part of the thesis focuses on marketing communication, the types of challenges the marketing organizations face today and how agile methods claim to offer solutions to those challenges. In addition, common challenges related to practicing agility are discussed. The research approach was research-oriented case study, and the data was collected using semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were randomly selected from a pool of agile marketing practitioners across the Nordics, meaning that all interviewees were applying agile practices at the time of the research. The interview data was analysed using thematic analysis. Overall, agile marketing practitioners describe a world where agility is a good way of working in the marketing space, especially in the areas of social media management and content creation. Agile practices help the target marketing organization streamline their operations and improve employee productivity and engagement, but there is room for improvement when it comes to customer centricity. Agile marketing practitioners also raise challenges that are mostly rooted in frustrations related to collaboration with non-agile teams. Management of incoming ad hoc marketing requests and application of agile practices to long marketing projects are also examples of challenges. Suggested development areas for the target organization are related to improving the management of ad hoc work, improving collaboration with non-agile teams, improving the use of agile practices on team-level to ensure customer centricity as well as raising awareness around being agile versus doing agile paradox.