Agile Marketing Demystified

A compelling and comprehensive description of Agile Marketing.



Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jYrzobkpP0

Holacracy Teaser

Vivid description of the Emerging Concept of Holacracy

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUHfVoQUj54

Is Holacracy here to stay???

Holacracy, a relatively new term in today's corporate world, refers to a type of organisational governance in which decision making authority lies in the hands of the vital many over the trivial few. The power quotient is distributed across a fractal holarchy of self-organising teams rather than being vested at the top of the pyramid. The term holacracy is derived from the term holarchy, coined by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book "The Ghost in the Machine". A holarchy is composed of holons or units that are autonomous and self-reliant, but also dependent on the greater whole of which they are a part. Thus a holarchy is a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function both as autonomous wholes and also as dependent parts.

The Holacracy system was incubated at Ternary Software, an Exton, PA, company that was noted for experimenting with more democratic forms of organizational governance. Thereafter, the system got great impetus when the American e-tailer Zappos.com decided to embrace Holacracy. This system aims at replacing the traditional top down approach by a more practical bottom up one. The grassroot level teams are the ones actually taking care of core operations and thus, their contact with customers is more significant. In such a scenario, it is highly probable that their decisions will be able to provide more value to the end user. Apart from them, it has been observed that the top management decisions are not always in sync with the customer expectations. The concept of Holacracy gives a new insight to the top management through the expertise of their employees.

In today's competitive world, attrition is a major concern for major organisations and the holarchy structure addresses this by giving a sense of belongingness to the employees. In Holacracy, bureaucracy takes a backseat and this is turn fosters the entrepreneurial spirit of the teams. Holacracy is claimed to increase agility, efficiency, transparency, innovation and accountability within an organization. The approach encourages individual team members to take initiatives and gives them a process in which their concerns or ideas can be addressed.The system of distributed authority reduces the burden on leaders to make every decision.

The flip side of Holacracy is that it may not always lead to superior Business Performance. Further, the hierarchies do not simply vanish; they exist but across teams now with a funneling approach. In light of the changing marketing context, it will be important to see whether Holacracy provides organisations with the desired competitive edge.

References:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
2. http://www.zapposinsights.com/about/holacracy
3. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/01/15/making-sense-of-zappos-and-holacracy/            

Marketing Technologists- Creating BUZZ in SMARTer ways

In today's world of increasing technology adoption, shrinking product life-cycles and waning customer loyalty, traditional marketing methods are failing to strike gold. The Multi-coloured billboards dotting the city landscapes are gradually waning in their efforts of winning over the modern day tech-savvy customer. The world has become SMARTER and the power of a click and swype has conquered boundaries and demographies alike. In such a situation, the advent of SMAC has drastically changed the way marketers look at the world. Apart from this, the huge competition for market share has seen companies all over the world shelling out enormous amounts for marketing activities. With more money comes more responsibility and the use of technology for optimising the spends becomes extremely important in fulfilling these responsibilities in a justified manner. Traditional marketing departments were devoid of people who could justify the marketing spend based on their technical expertise. This transformation in the marketing world saw the evolution of the Marketing Technologist. Bridging the gap between Marketing and IT is the prime role of a Marketing Technologist.

Digital touch-points and footprints have become order of the day; the cookies have virtually given the grip of our everyday activities to the marketing experts. Here, the marketing technologists play a key role in the selection of appropriate software solutions and devices necessary for engaging the customers of today in a cost effective manner. Selecting the right mix of e-marketing channels, integrating the various promotional schemes and ensuring the homogeneity of content across multiple platforms are certain avenues wherein the marketing technologist needs to guide the marketing vertical. With the advent of analytics, the campaign measurement quotient has become very important and thus, the spends are bifurcated based on the success of the touchpoints. In a nutshell, Marketing Technologist has emerged as the key enabler of marketing decisions in today’s maze of optic fibres and connected consumers.  

For more, please check out:

https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-rise-of-the-chief-marketing-technologist