Our cooperation with the Marketing Agility Community

At Fastuna, we are passionate about Agility and promoting the agile approach within organisations. This passion has brought us together with Pam Ashby, a committed communication and agility enthusiast, and that’s when the Marketing Agility Community was born: led by Pam and supported by like-minded agilists Nadine Rochester and Rachel Chapman.

This community was created by marketers for marketers. It brings together the world of agile with the world of marketing, raising awareness of how the principles of Agile and agility can support marketers to work in a more effective and adaptive way. An Agile approach to Marketing helps marketers focus on the 'right' things and get them done quicker and more effectively than through traditional routes. A great asset to any marketer who’s ever felt overwhelmed by snowballing deadlines!

Pam Ashby is a passionate Agile Communication and Agile Marketing advocate and coach which is why we felt that as a consumer insights platform we make up a great team. Together we achieve better customer-centricity through integrating our fast test and learn approaches with the Agile Marketing and Communication knowledge that Pam brings.

At the end of last year we ran a survey together to find out what people thought about their marketing work in the UK and Europe. The global situation expedited the adaptation of more flexible ways of working by forcing companies and people to overcome the barriers associated with it.

Immediately we learnt that:

• Over a ⅓ felt unsatisfied with the way their marketing department works
  
• Only 20% engage in daily standups
  
• Over a ⅓ practice sprints/ kanban/ scrum
  
• 51% want to speed up decision making
  
• 57% want to understand their consumers better

This survey is helping us explore how we, as a marketing industry, can respond to the new world of change. It also questions the assumptions around agile marketing. That is why we call it the 'Future of Marketing' survey and refrain from using the term 'agile' in the survey. Many people understand agile marketing as a process used to run digital projects. Just look at how polarising are the ways in which people talk about agile marketing:

The survey is still up and running. We are looking forward to learning more about the changing trends in marketing and contributing to the industry as a whole. Please share far and wide.

Over the last few months as we were all getting to grips with virtual working we ran a series of successful mini-hackathons.
Organised together with the Marketing Agility Community, they were built around the Fastuna Agile consumer research tool. It was a collaboration between Pam Ashby, Nadine Rochester, B2B Marketing Director, Digital Project Leader and a Certified Scrum Master, Rachel Chapman, a Marketing consultant, specialising in agile marketing, marketing strategy and customer journey analytics, and Community sponsors Ascentae, who provided technology and support.

There was a guest presentation by Ekaterina Kharitonova, a Global media and measurement manager at Bayer who shared her inspiring experience engaging different people and generating great ideas.