Agile Marketing Strategies: How to Transform the Customer-Brand Dynamics in Services

The way businesses traditionally connect with customers has been linear, defined by a purchase funnel while in reality the path to purchase is far from being linear, since customers interact with networks of people, conversations and technologies across, adjacent and within an organisation (O’Driscoll, 2014). These trends push organisations of all kinds throughout the world to learn to adapt and transform in order to overcome rapid increases in complexity, volatility, and uncertainty. The main objective of this paper is to provide and to implement a conceptual model of agile marketing strategies focused on customer-brand dynamics. The conceptual model captures the emerging debates around agile marketing and management. Research questions driving this paper are twofold: 1/ to identify the elements and stages of agile marketing strategies to deal with customer-brand dynamics transformation and 2/ to identify the possibilities to apply agile marketing in services. The research study, based on a survey of Bulgarian companies in the field of services, concludes that there is a gap between what was expressed as a strategy for change by the managers and what was actually implemented. The achieved results are used to suggest and discuss several implications for using agile marketing strategies.