New Challenges in Marketing Development: From the "Artificially Perfect" to the "Empirically Viable"

 

Digitalization has imposed a new, much faster pace, while at the same time evolving consumer demand (new customer journeys, easier comparison, etc.) and creating new competitors that challenge traditional business models. Today, marketing departments have to reinvent themselves to face new challenges: innovation, user experience, business model evolution, real-time customer relationships... which create new responsibilities and revolutionize traditional activities.  

The marketing departments we meet express their desire to make progress in the development of innovative offers (incremental or disruptive innovation), whether in ideation, design or marketing.  We believe in an agile approach to marketing, inspired by the way startups work (agile methods, lean startup, etc.) without hiding the complexity of traditional companies and their existing structures. This approach avoids the trap of an "artificially perfect" offer in order to identify an "empirically viable" solution.

There are many levers to pull to reinvent the marketing function.
First, marketing departments need to get out of their silos and open up:

• to identify customer pain points, value creation opportunities, and consumption drivers,

• to their internal ecosystem (commercial, IS, production, etc.) in order to benefit from their expertise at the right time and to align their priorities at the operational level,

• to the external ecosystem for state-of-the-art information and early detection of weak signals.

 

The marketing organization must also evolve, in particular by focusing on products (monitoring over time) rather than on projects  :

• Rethinking the annual decision cycles, particularly on the budget, in favor of a logic closer to that of the venture capitalist,

• The evolution of the project manager's role towards that of product owner, in charge of both the development and the operational monitoring and optimization of the product, responsible over time for its commercial success,

• A renewal of skills through the multiplication of new expert profiles, recruited as needed: design-thinking (expert in ideation), data analyst (expert in analysis), scrum master (expert in managing the development process), UX designer (expert in the user journey)...

• A redesign of structures to embody this product logic by bringing together, over time, all the skills (marketing, sales, IS, etc.) needed to develop and optimize a product in small teams (max.10 people)

• Innovative methods to deliver more value with less effort, in particular through better customer orientation, while limiting investments as long as uncertainty remains high.

We believe that marketing is being reinvented and that its role in the company is more central than ever. But traditional marketing is over: new standards are emerging. Whatever your sector or maturity level, this paradigm shift must be made: the speed of this new marketing is such that any delay in getting started will be very difficult to catch up with.

Our ideas on agile marketing:

#1 - The new role of the customer at the heart of marketing development

#2 - Customer value before economic value!

#3 - Accelerating to keep pace with the marketplace

#4 - New organizations for new interactions

#5 - Funding complex and uncertain projects