Group Fashion's Agile Marketing Journey
Agile Marketing Transition
The Covid-19 global pandemic has put several companies to the challenge but it seems that those with Agile marketing teams such as eBay and Uber have responded fast and implemented successful campaigns that brought them ahead of the competition. eBay transformed high street fashion stores that were forced to close down to an online shop, driving a 256% year-on-year increase in small businesses joining eBay (WARC Media Awards, 2020).
Many benefits come by taking an Agile approach, we have seen Workfront show that respondents of a study improved their speed-to-market and adapted and responded faster by 93%. Moreover, 87% of respondents improved productivity just by moving to Agile project management (Workfront, 2020). This has made it clear that the digital marketing agencies need to have an Agile Marketing approach to respond to change, test and use data, engage and interact with customers transparently and undergo many small experiments (Workfront, 2020).
Why Group Fashion turned Agile
Group Fashion implemented a new workflow using Jira in combination with confluence & Trello - all products from Atlassian to revolutionise the way they develop and deliver digital marketing services to the Fashion Industry. 'Fashion companies come to us for help to reach certain goals and it wasn't long before we realised that working with a waterfall method was not the answer to meeting release dates for clients', says CEO of Group Fashion. It was clear that we needed a new approach for scaling communication, collaboration and management at Group Fashion. That is why we chose to work with a set of Agile principles and practices which are briefly outlined below.
Any new task or issue that comes in contact with our marketing team goes straight into the backlog of the Jira software, this Agile principle is called scrum. We chose to work with scrum so that we had the flexibility to run short 2 week sprints which help us work and achieve goals faster. What happens is that we are able to pull some tasks or issues from the backlog and make a sprint from it. The goal is to work with the tasks in that sprint and when they are completed, move to the next sprint. No matter what, we continuously ask ourselves - Are we doing the right things to provide the best digital marketing service to our customers? and this helps us keep our customer-centric marketing strategy together.
#fashionindustry #Agilemarketing #Agile
References
WARC Media Awards (2020), eBay: Stronger as One, Entrant, Effective Channel Integration.
Workfront (2020), 4 ways to get started with Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing within the Fashion Industry | Louise Grant
ReplyDeleteAgile approaches are created to explore feasibility in short cycles and the willingness to adapt to changes based on feedback and assessment. Thriving in the digital world requires the ability and willingness for businesses to adapt to changes rapidly.
Agile Marketing predicts how people will react to different marketing promotions and campaigns. It values the response of the campaign and agile marketers will respond quickly to changes in the business environment, the competition and customer needs.
As many fashion brands suffered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ASOS proved itself agile enough to change rapidly to new ideas such as adding extra leisurewear in response to the major changes in consumer lifestyles. By optimising its focus on digital technology and scaling up its use in Augmented Reality (AR) for the fitting process, the online store stood in a good position with reacting to these changes with consumer behaviour (Sender, 2021).
Agile Marketing | Ruth Kelly
ReplyDeleteA key principle of agile marketing is valuing the ability to respond to change rather than strictly following the plan (Workfront, 2021). Fashion brands have never had to adapt more quickly to change than in 2020 when they faced the full wrath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses which sold their wares through traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ stores were told to shut the doors, with no concrete end in sight.
Fashion brands that were quick to adapt and pivot were able to take advantage of a variety of e-commerce grants such as the Trading Online Voucher Scheme provided by Local Enterprise Offices throughout Ireland. This enabled them to move online quickly and to sell off seasonal stock before it became dated.
Interestingly, Deloitte’s ‘State of the Consumer Tracker’ found that 51% of people in Ireland would spend a little more on locally sourced goods, while 43% of consumers purchased from brands that adapted well to the Covid-19 pandemic (Deloitte, 2020). This highlights the importance of having a strong digital presence and strategy in 2021, along with the need for businesses to adapt so that they can provide consumers with a seamless online experience.
Deloitte (2020) “Press Release: Increase in Spending Across All Categories”. Online Article. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/ie/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/increase-spending-intention-across-all-categories.html [Accessed 13/03/21]
Workfront (2021), “Four Ways to Get Started with Agile Marketing”[E-Book]. Available At: https://www.workfront.com/resources/the-complete-guide-to-agile-marketing [Accessed 13/03/21]