Learning to do Agile in Marketing

Can everybody hear me? Is the mic on? Great. How is everyone enjoying the Business Agility India Hyderabad conference so far? Are we enjoying it? Yes, that is great. Me too. I have learned a lot already. One of the things I learned yesterday, the most interesting thing for me, was that Bala had a hypothesis that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of wisdom that people have and the amount of hair on their head. I guess I have another data point to test that hypothesis. So, yeah, it is great to be here. I am going to kick off now with learning to do agile in marketing. I have got to tell you straight away, I am not a marketing expert. I come from technology. I have been working in agile for about 10 years, but about two years ago, I started working at an Australian bank, one of the so-called "big four" Australian banks, the National Australia Bank. You can see the logo there. If you hear me say NAB, that is what everyone calls that bank in Australia; it stands for National Australia Bank. Okay, so I was invited to join NAB to help them as an agile coach in the marketing department. They had about 200 people working in marketing. This is an in-house marketing department; they are not taking requests from external companies that want marketing; this is purely marketing for the bank itself. Marketing was still a silo; it was not well-integrated with other areas of business, but they worked a lot with technology. They had different teams, and their teams were quite significant. Before I started, they had actually started their agile journey, so they had been doing agile for about 18 months.

This is some of the work that the marketing team at the bank did. If any of you have been to Melbourne, you would have seen these. These are trams; they run in the middle of the street. They cause a lot of chaos at times when people do not know how to drive around them, but this one is branded for NAB. They will be quite creative about how they can get their marketing collateral out into the environment. For those of you who have a marketing background, that is called "out of home." This is advertising that you see when you are out on the road or on the street, so things like billboards, banners, posters, signage, even trams.

I want to give you an example of some of this... This is actually a television commercial. The thing about this particular commercial is that they run it, of course, in social media too, digital and so forth, on Facebook, on Twitter, Instagram, Google Ads. This is actually a very brand-oriented commercial; it is not pushing a particular product; it is telling us about the brand of NAB. That slogan, "more than money," that is something that the bank wanted to use to shift how it marketed its products and services away from just pushing products. Instead of just saying, "Hey guys, we have got a credit card, we have got low rates, apply for a credit card," or, "Get a mortgage for a home loan, we have got low rates, here is what we can offer you," and just promoting that way, what they wanted to do is change that conversation with their customers. That slogan, "more than money," kind of sums that up. Banks are more than money; we want to help you with many different financial aspects of your lives. They want to build up a relationship with you as a customer over the long term, not just sell you products. That is essentially the message it is trying to convey.

Jumping away from marketing and back towards agile. One of the things that Evan mentioned the other day, we do not become agile for the purpose of becoming agile. We have to become agile because it is serving a goal; it is meeting a need. We want to become agile so we can get feedback sooner, so we can understand, respect, and respond to our customers faster, so we can deliver faster, so we can do fewer of the things that are low value, and more of the things that are high value. Agile can hopefully help us do this.

Specifically talking about marketing. The marketing department at NAB realized they needed to move away from how they were doing things. They were kind of traditional. They were focused very much on traditional modes of marketing: television commercials, billboards, radio spots. All that kind of promotion stuff that is very old-school, that is the way that we used to do it. Sometimes, people call that "above the line" marketing. These days, marketing is much more digital, and technology is digital, so those two domains are becoming much closer. I would argue that marketing and technology are almost inseparable now. Data-driven marketing. How can we use our existing data to understand what our customers do, what their problems are, and use that marketing knowledge from data to build new products and services and communicate better with our customers? Customer journeys and moments. I will talk about that in a moment. Again, it is moving away from selling products and trying to understand the whole lifecycle of the customer relationship with us as an organization.

An example of that, and I found this really interesting, because some of you would have heard about customer journeys and customer experience, and we also talked about customer moments. This is kind of a technical term that we use in UX and customer experience, but this bank was actually using the term "moments." They called it a "life moment." They seem to have pulled that from the technical marketing domain, and they are actually using that to promote to customers. You get the idea here: "We are there for every moment: travel, home and property, life and family, work life, unplanned life moments." These are things that banks... This is when bad things happen, right? It is when you lose your job, or you get sick, or something bad happens to you that affects your income. In the past, banks were like, "We do not really care; that is your problem." But because banks now want to have this lifetime relationship with you as a customer, they want to help you through these times, because in the end, it benefits them. They keep you as a customer; they can help you with finance plans and so forth. So, life moments.

This slide has to do with a customer journey. The particular example here is that of an Indian overseas student who is studying in Scotland, and they want to open a bank account. You can see, the top line is the channel, so where they first heard about the bank. They see some advertising when they arrive in Scotland; they go to the bank, and they have got to fill in forms to apply for their bank account. The second swimlane here is around the context, so these are the actual activities that they have to do. I will not go through all of them, but these are actually quite challenging in this case. So, they are online forms, but the bank said, "Fill them in online, and then print them out and bring them to us in the branch." That kind of is a bad experience for the customer. The last swimlane on the bottom here is a visual representation of the customer's satisfaction. So, they are very happy: "I want to get a new bank account." They are kind of less happy as the journey goes along. So, what we want to try and do in marketing, and in IT, and in agile is to make that experience a much happier and more seamless one for our customers.

Another visual representation of that kind of idea. On the left-hand side, the customer browses the web. The customer then applies; an application is completed. With digital and technology, we can see what people are actually doing. We can see how many people click on the ad, how many then come through to our website or our app, how many people actually complete an application, and we can measure that very precisely. This again is what I am talking about in terms of the synergy or the convergence of agile and marketing. So, we can measure all these things, which is great, and then we can, when we see that we are losing a lot of customers at certain points in the journey, that is when we can take some actions to try and improve that. Be aware, of course, that you are always going to have high leakage rates, because, you know, when you click on an ad on the web, do you ever... How many times do you actually end up making a purchase? Probably a small proportion of the time, right? That is okay; we want to just bring those numbers up. The thing that we have to understand is that customers do not care how difficult it is for us as marketers, as technology people, as business people. They do not care about our problems. I do not care that this is a complex problem that we need to solve; all they want is a nice experience, and we have to keep that in mind. It is hard to do all this stuff, but that is our job.

A classic from Steve Jobs: "Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology." Do not build technology because you think it is a good idea, and then try and push it to your customers. That is the wrong way around. That might work if you are really smart, but probably it is not going to.

Back to the context of the bank. Where were we on our agile journey? Agile was generally well-supported; people liked it; it was a nice way of working for them. They implemented what I would call a basic, IT-centric way of doing agile, which is called Scrum. Some of you may have heard of Scrum. They felt they got some benefits, but they wanted to expand that even more; they felt they could get more value. The issue with Scrum as a way of doing agile in marketing is, it is really focused on product development. It works quite well for product development teams. It is when you want to build a product, you have got a single team, you are doing innovative things, you chunk that up into two-week iterations or sprints, you have a product backlog; it all works pretty nicely if you are in IT or software development. But let us have a look at the differences between building a software solution or an app, and marketing. Software is a creative process; it is innovative; it has high technical risks. Often, we are building systems and things that have not been built before; new problems are being solved. There are new processes that we have in our teams to help that happen, and we are generally focusing on one product at a time; one team will focus on one product. Marketing, on the other hand, well, it is creative. I would say it is also innovative to a certain extent, but we are generally using technologies and ways of working that already exist. So, even in digital, we are using Google Ads, we are using social media, we are using websites and apps, where the analytics and the digital problems around that are quite well-understood. The other really important thing is that we are generally repeating that process over and over again. So, the content of our marketing campaign will change, but the processes are essentially the same. It is like, we want to have 10 ads on Facebook and a television commercial and whatever else we need, but we understand how to do that already. So, there are some key differences between a marketing context of doing work and us building a software system.

Challenges again in the specific context of the marketing department that I was working in... You can see that these are all teams. This is to give you an idea of the value stream. So, a product team might come up with a new idea for a product or a service; it passes through a number of different teams in marketing. They actually outsource a lot of their creative work to external agencies, so you can see there is a lot of handoff and back-and-forth. If, for example, the creative agency did not understand the brief correctly, or did not do a great job, then they had to send their work back, and that leads them to... Anyway, so there is a lot of rework, a lot of churn, a lot of waste, a lot of handoffs.

This handsome gentleman here is again demonstrating this complexity of the value chain. You can see that there are different swimlanes here, and lots of little arrows. It might be hard for you to see, but again, it is work passing back and forth between teams. We know that is not ideal from an agile way of thinking.

A similar image here: too many handoffs between teams, a lot of waste, waiting for teams to finish work. Even getting work into a team's backlog is quite challenging. A lot of waiting, and then, because the teams are not working directly together, there is a lot of rework, because team B does not understand what team A did.

What agile methods would suit marketing? Let us try those. Firstly, break away from a product development model. Become more cross-functional in our team structures. Form, test, and iterate on hypotheses quickly. MVP. I know Rajesh talked yesterday about... I think Gabe Brown? Experimentation. Let us make hypotheses, run experiments, see how they work. That is a very agile way of working. If we do all these things, then hopefully we can get marketing value into the market faster. These are some of the things that we did at the team level. I will just highlight here, we moved to a Kanban approach, which is like a continuous flow approach, rather than a Scrum approach. We really wanted to pay attention to prioritizing work. Less is more. The problem for these guys was that they were doing many campaigns at one time, and all the digital assets in each of those campaigns were kind of equally weighted, even though they were not of equal value, so teams tried to do everything. We wanted to change that mindset, so that teams could pick the highest value items and work on those.

I have got to give you a quick case study. Overseas travel journey moment. This is what we tried to experiment on. We wanted to become more data-driven, more digital marketers. We wanted to become more cross-functional in our teams, and we wanted to get our value to market faster. This was the problem, the customer problem, that we wanted to address, and also a problem for the bank. When people went overseas, what the bank wanted them to do is tell the bank that they were going overseas, because then they knew, "Okay, Anthony is going to Indonesia, he is going to India, so if we see activity on his credit cards from those locations, then we know it is probably okay. But if he does not tell us, then we are not sure; maybe we think it is a suspicious transaction; we might block the card." They basically wanted customers to tell them more often when they were going overseas. If they blocked your card, then you have got to ring the bank, and it is a drama, and so on and so forth, and it cost the bank money. So, the mobile app that NAB uses already had a nice feature that if you went anywhere near the airport, through GPS, it sent you a little alert saying, "Hey, you are near the airport; are you going overseas?" which is kind of a nice feature. Not always a nice customer experience, because sometimes you were just going to the airport to pick up a friend or something, so then there was an element of disappointment when you were like, "Actually, no, I am not going overseas, I am just picking someone up." But that was one of the things that was already in operation. Going back to our problem. So, we want to encourage the registration of travel; we want our customers to tell us when they are doing that. These are the benefits: better customer service, a better experience, reduced costs, reduced amounts of credit card fraud, and possibly a chance to cross-sell and promote other products. So, what do we want to do?

We had a hypothesis that if we looked at credit card transactions of our customers in Australia, if they... Our hypothesis was, if they spent more than a certain amount of money on airfares, it was a good indicator that they might be going overseas. So, the journey essentially was, we would understand their transactions, we would send them an email, they would open the email, and if they were in fact traveling overseas, they could click through and register their travel. Pretty simple, right? This is our hypothesis then: we believe that identifying customers through transactions will result in some of these customers registering for overseas travel. Very importantly, we will know when we have succeeded, so before we start the experiment, we already have an idea of what success means, what the qualification is for how we know that we have been successful. So, we define that up front. How did we do that? We formed a quick, virtual team that was cross-functional. So, we had data, we had the email template team, we had creative, we had digital production, and we had digital, all in the one team. So, we had all the right people in the team, who could act really quickly. We had a two-month timeline to do this, which is kind of long, but these guys were all working in other teams at the same time. Results? The concept was proven. Two things that we actually validated: one is that this cross-functional team idea worked, and it allowed us to get things done more quickly and efficiently. Two, our hypothesis was validated. So, we found that, yeah, sure, we emailed a number of people who were not actually traveling overseas, and we emailed people who did not respond, maybe even though they were going overseas, but we did get a significant number of responses. So, we were able to say, yes, this is a quick and dirty exercise, but now we can refine it. We have proven that the hypothesis is valid. So, the outcome for the team was that the team was empowered, and they could continue to formulate these hypotheses and continue to pursue this line of work.

What next? I think someone yesterday mentioned an experiment backlog. So, rather than a backlog of features or user stories, a nice idea is to actually have a backlog of experiments or hypotheses that you want to run. The sky is the limit. What is the customer problem that we are trying to solve?

Lessons for agile marketers. A few tips from me, as an agile coach. One, do not go all in. Do not go in and try and convert your whole organization or your whole marketing department to agile in one hit. It is better to have a small pilot, test these ideas, see how they work. Understand your purpose. We are a marketing team; our outcomes are this; let us pick an agile system that actually suits that. Analyze your value streams. Simple visual management. So, tools like Kanban are useful in this respect. The most important one, on the far right there, inspect, adapt, and measure. So, whenever you are building something in an agile way, have a way to measure its success, and then get your customer feedback, get it out into the market