As pharma marketing organizations start implementing customer-centric capabilities, we start to see two key issues surface. First, the need for marketers to shift their focus to understanding customer preferences to drive personalization strategies. Second, the need for marketers to leverage cloud-based computing and adopt the right business processes to deploy personalization strategies into the marketplace. Pharma companies struggle with these customer centricity shifts due to departmental silos, hand offs between teams and stakeholders, and a shared lack of objectives. An Agile model—which helps organizations solve complex business and technology problems in order to deliver iterative value to customers—is being tested in the marketplace in order to address these issues, but there’s more to it than just speed.

With an Agile model, teams need the right people, technology and culture to be successful. Without the right end-to-end process—planning, building, deploying, learning and monitoring—partnered with a common vision, marketing organizations won’t be able to adapt to a changing market landscape, leading to flat results and an unchanged customer experience. In order to find success with an Agile model, organizations need to first understand how it differs from traditional marketing, which focuses on the creation of linear campaigns based on what the brand feels is most important for the customer to hear.

The Agile model’s iterative, data-driven framework often conflicts with a linear marketing approach across the life cycle of a campaign. Here’s how:

How Agile can help you align with your customer-centric vision

• Transparency: Agile brings cross-functional teams together to connect the dots across verticals. Marketing organizations can utilize recurring meetings like “sprint reviews” to provide visibility into the team’s progress toward a predefined goal and the key learnings after that goal is reached. These ceremonies establish an ongoing two-way dialogue about maintaining momentum while keeping the goal of customer value in mind.
• Inspection: Agile helps marketing teams build customer experiences with concrete learning/measurement goals in mind, especially during the brand planning process. Marketing organizations can shift planning from an annual, month-long activity of strategizing based on gut feeling to an iterative, strategic approach that leverages real-time data. Said another way, data-driven decisions will need to be at the center of all planning activities.
• Adaptation: Marketing organizations will need to restructure processes to react to insights in real time via a “test and learn” mindset. In order to execute on their learnings, teams will need the right tools to rapidly adjust content and leverage the right capabilities to execute against market insights.

In short, marketing leaders setting up Agile organizations for success will need to cultivate a customer-centric mindset within the teams and give them the right connected tools to execute in this way. This will prevent pharma organizations from using solutions that can hinder progress.

In future blog posts, we’ll talk about the tools and technology helping Agile marketing organizations reach their goal of delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.