Why does Agility matter to grow your business at 360?
We’ve been speaking about Digital Transformation and customer experience for a few days now. And,we believe Agility is the most important factor to focus while practising Digital Transformation.
1.What exactly is Agility?
In simple terms, we’d ask you to hyper-lapse the process of evolution.
Jokes apart, Agility is the ability to understand and rapidly adapt to the changes. It is about the willingness to experiment and innovate new methods and ways to sustain and grow.
2.Why is it important for a business?
To understand it, you need to understand that
we live in an era of unmatched opportunities. Any one with enough passion, hustle, patience and the willingness to experiment can build a competing brand with far less monetary investment than ever before.
-Gary Vaynerchuk
The best example would be the brand Xiaomi. Not that we support it or encourage its products. But, credit where it’s due,the brand is only successful thanks to the agile mindset of the founders.
The brand uses its agility to learn from Apple and its products based on:
a.Consumer/Community Opinions
b.Supply & Demand analysis
c.Market Research
It would then build a mass-market android equivalent of the device implementing both the features that Apple failed to deliver and the ones perfected by Apple.
Thus, delivering Apple’s User experience at an affordable price.
Speaking in business market terms, it’s called Digital Business Agility.
Note: We don’t intend to offend any brand in the process and we request the readers to only consider this an example.
3.How can brands adapt Digital Business Agility?
Digitally speaking, brands start with adopting new technologies to simplify Consumer Experience and increase the global brand impact.
But, the process isn’t as simple as it sounds. In fact, it’s a three step process that starts with:
3.1.Hyper-Awarneness:
While building a business, awareness is the state of mind where you are aware about your business, your products/services, your brand analytics and your market position.
Traditional brands rely on these analytics to build their business.
But, Hyper-Awareness, on the other hand, is a state where you are not just aware of your brand’s internal analytics but on a global scale, are aware about:
a.Consumer Demand
b.Consumer Review
c.Economic Scenario
d.Technological Impact and Advances
e.Market Scenario
f.Market Competition
Meaning, to compete in the global market, you don’t just need to understand your product but also, need to understand your customer’s opinion and the market’s needs.
3.1.1.Practising Hyper-Awareness:
You don’t need to be an expert to practise hyper-awareness. A brand can start by understanding their customer’s opinion based on constant feedback.
Implementing a feedback system impacts both your hyper-awareness and the brand-community awareness.
And, to be hyper-aware, brands need to start understanding their market needs and the market economy. Meaning,brands need to use the feedback system to analyse the consumer’s budget comforts and expectations.
Again, speaking of an example, we are constantly reminded of how Xiaomi and OnePlus work to build and engage with a community on a global scale to understand their audience better.
In short, for one to practise hyper-awareness, we’d suggest to focus on
1.building a community.
2.engage with your audience
3.Understand the community
4.Understand the market and analyse the products
3.2.Informed Decision Making:
Now, you might be wondering about how can one leverage the hyper-awareness attained to build a better brand?
Well, that’s where the Informed Decision Making techniques come into play.
The primary aspects of making informed decisions are:
a.To provide a better Customer/Consumer Experience (CX)
b.To instantly provide your brand’s products/services on the fore-front of the technological markets.
The community feedback and the consumer opinion analysis obtained from the hyper-awareness will allow you to plan and strategize impactful methods to represent your brand and improve the CX.
The strategies and plans based on consumer opinion lead to optimized investments and better revenue generation.
3.2.1.Practising Informed Decision Making:
Considering the community feedback and consumer opinions, brands like Xiaomi and One Plus can not just provide impactful products at an affordable price but also, compete with global brands without investing a lump-sum on advertising and production.
This feedback system also helps them predict the actual consumer demand for a product in the market and thus, helps them make better investment choices rather than producing a bulk amount of devices with no customers to buy them.
3.3.Rapid/Fast Implementation:
Now that, you are aware of the market and its requirements and have drafted a strategy to produce, advertise and supply your products to the consumer, you need to be quick in executing the said strategy.
To understand why fast-implementation matters, you need to understand a very important fact that the market-trends of technological market are
a.Time-dependent: The market trends only stay on the top for a limited time-period. The trend factor increases as people’s expectations increase.
The best product today may not be the best tomorrow. It’s all about agility and improvisation.
The best way to describe this would be Skype. Pre-Lockdown, Skype normalized the video calling trend in the market. But, post-lockdown, Zoom took over skype, leaving it far behind because of skype’s inability to cope up with the market trends.
b.Usability Innovation Dependent: The market-trends mainly focus on the usability innovation of the products. Meaning, it doesn’t really matter if the product/service has the best of innovation that the world has ever seen, but, if it’s not useful in making the customer’s life better, it isn’t really a mass-market product.
And, the innovation should be such that, it should co-work with the current products and should pave way for the future products to work with.
The reason for it to co-work is to make sure that even with future innovations, the product will remain compatible so as to remain an evergreen product.
For example, Elon Musk’s Tesla can be called an evergreen product because, with its performance increases with every software update. (innovation indirectly)
3.3.1.Practising Rapid Implementation:
Again, the best example for this would be the adaption of Notches on smartphones by every brand. It was a market movement that was inspired by Apple and every smartphone brand out there understood the hype for it and we found devices with different types of notches with the time-span being less than a year.
4.Is Agility the key to sustainability for brands in Future?
In 2020, the technology and the technological markets are unpredictable. It’s impact increases faster than ever before.
You need to be willing to invest time and work to experiment with new strategies for your brand to succeed.
The outcome can be success or failure but with planned strategies you can be on the safer side no matter what the outcome is.
To sustain, you need to be agile, understand and rapidly adapt new technologies. If not, the sustainability of your brand is limited and the competitors will leave you far behind.
With the current technological-market trends, it looks like agile transformation is the key to brand-sustainability.
