Exploring Agile Marketing Strategies

In the last decade, co-creation with crowds has guided companies to develop customer centric marketing strategies, encouraging customer engagement with brands. For example, the growth of LEGO has relied on customer inputs and analysis of their personality and behavior in transforming its business. Similarly, at Netflix, executives are committed to share information with people who are engaged in creative work and ensure that the information flows to everyone who needs it. Such strategy supports business agility and customer centric management processes. Besides many operational elements, agility in business is linked to consumer behavior.

My new book, Agile Marketing Strategies: New Approaches to Engaging Consumer Behavior, addresses multi-layered themes between the broad domains of consumer behavior and marketing strategies with focus on agility as a business driver. Emphasizing agile marketing strategy, this book argues the developing meaningful relationship with the stakeholders by analyzing neurobehavioral attributes and various sensitive touch points. The book offers new concepts on co-creation and coevolution in business development processes.

Crowdsourcing and Collective Intelligence

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a creative tool for companies today to expand their outreach to customers, map their perceptions, and understand behavioral implications of customers in business. Thus, this tool has led to deliver collective intelligence, which helps companies build the business design cube by integrating the concepts of design-to-market, design-to-society, and design-to-value in business modelling process. Co-creation allows companies to continually tap the skills and insights of stakeholders and develop new ways of building value-chain. Crowdsourcing platforms (physical and digital forums) are largely interactive for exploring new experiences and connections. The crowd-based collective intelligence process grows organically over time in the organization as a system. 

Crowd dynamics can be explained as collective intelligence, which reveals that no one knows everything while everyone knows something. Customer value has become central to business modelling. Most companies develop marketing strategies (a principal constituent of business model) on assumptions of customer values, which might be a misfit while implementing a business model. Collective intelligence provides the real perceptions of customers and the rationale for new products and services.

From Behavioral Analysis to Neuro-marketing Strategies

Consumer behavior is a set of socio-psychological indicators that cultivate a cognitive process in human beings. It refers to the range of personality attributes exhibited by people, which are influenced by societal values, culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, power, relationships, and persuasion. Behavior in humans is grown as learned, acquired, or shared process over the spatial and temporal factors. Consumer-centric companies periodically map behavioral patterns of consumers by understanding major perceptional and attitudinal patterns and interpret them to develop appropriate marketing strategies. However, consumer behavior is sensitive to the social dominance, self-esteem and self-actualization, hedonic values, and vogue in the marketplace. 

The book discusses the analysis of consumer behavior as a fundamental tool to build agility in business models and strategies. Companies often undermine the behavioral changes in consumers and suffer from market setbacks. The neurobehavioral dimensions affect the consumer perceptions and consumption patterns. The cognitive processing styles, motivational interests and concerns, prioritization of personal values, and neurological structures and physiological functions of consumers broadly determine their cognitive process in developing perception on the products and services. Exploring the recent scientific developments in the neurobehavioral areas, this book argues that stimulus-response is a psycho-physiological process, and meticulously affect the neuro-marketing strategies. This book focuses on converging the neural effects on consumer behavior and their implications in infusing agility in marketing approaches.

Social Media and Reverse Socialization

Various social media channels contribute to disseminate new ideas and serve as a pool of collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has evolved over time through the experiential interactions on social media channels. Socialization of businesses encourages people from different segments, socio-cultural backgrounds, and ethnicity to co-create innovative business ideas. The socialization process of business helps firms to grow agile and customer centric.

With the advancement of technology and convenience-led marketing, elderly consumers are feeling out of place in the market today as they are unable to cope with the technology driven marketing approaches, applications, and self-service platforms. Consequently, reverse socialization is gearing-up in the families as elderly consumers are being influenced by the young consumers. Reverse socialization is a process, which allows adolescents’ influence on their parents’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to consumption. Such behavior is driven by emotions, changing perceptions on products and services, and restructured cognitive ergonomics.

This book discusses the need for agility in business in the context of reverse sociology, socio-neurological behavior, and social self-concept. Individual’s cognition on social consumption and relative changes, contributes to the social self-concept, which determines the buying decisions and the relative degree of influence. Research studies converging behavioral and neural mechanisms in social media use (SMU) and self-concept indicate that the cognitive weights between self-judgements and derived-peer-judgements are often narrow and highly correlated. Social media enables to get frequent crowd-based feedback as compared to inter-personal interactions and conventional meetings with peers. Consequently, the social media drives peer emotions in socialization of business among young consumers.

Agility in Marketing Strategies

As companies tend to develop diverse ways to better understand and respond to their customers' needs, relationship marketing has become central to the marketing community. The rising prominence of social media in manifesting voice of consumers has become the guiding phenomenon for the firms in building and reinforcing customer relations. Social media provides a powerful relationship management tool to companies that enables them to interact, engage, and provide customized value to consumers. Such trend in developing customer relations today has warned firms to be prepared for behavioral contingencies and focus on developing agile marketing strategies.

This book reviews the theories on business agility, consumer behavior, social intervention, collective intelligence, decision-making, and stakeholder values. It also discusses new strategies suitable to co-create agile business models in association with the market players and consumers for the companies in emerging markets and argues the rationale of including agility to increase customer-centric focus in business organization and co-create flexible marketing strategies to stay competitive.

The author is full-time professor of the Departament of Marketing and Business Intelligence at EGADE Business School.