Adriana Rocha, @ Greenbook, argues that with the growing need for the marketing function to be more agile, customer insights must also move in this direction.
“Agile management is an iterative and adaptive process where small, highly-collaborative teams work in a series of short cycles, incorporating rapid feedback, to deliver emergent solutions, emphasizing transparency among all stakeholders.”
What is Agile Market Research?
Agile Market Research represents a different approach to manage market research. It takes its inspiration from agile development and values:
- ‘Responding to change’ over ‘following a plan’
- ‘Individuals and interactions’ over ‘processes and tools’
- ‘Collaboration’ over ‘silos and hierarchy’
- ‘Rapid iterations’ over ‘long projects’
- ‘Numerous small experiments’ over ‘a few large studies’
Agile Market Research requires cross-functional team members – people who may have deep specialization or talent in a particular area but are also willing to pitch in on a wide variety of other tasks. In an agile team, no one says, “I’m just the analyst, so don’t bother me until you have the fieldwork done”. The whole team either succeeds together or fails together. Agile is a continuous loop of plan, build, inspect, adapt, repeat.
Agile Market Researchers also follow a process, a process designed to increase alignment with the business aims of the client, to improve communication, both within and outside the market research team, and to increase the speed and responsiveness of research. This process is interactive, allowing for short studies and experiments, frequent feedback, and the ability to react to changing conditions.
For the team at Delve Research and Strategy, Agile Market Research is an approach we whole heartedly agree with. As it allows businesses and companies to get relevant information in a timely manner so they can make better decisions online viagra no prescription.