The Agile Consumer: Navigating the Empowered Economy and the Future of Customer Experience

By Greg Kihlström

We are living in an agile world. What started with technologists and marketers has spread across entire organizations, and didn't stop there. Consumers are thinking agile as well. They are more willing to be part of product development and the process of building brands than ever before, due to a number of social, technological, and economic factors. Also, as employees, they are also more interested in sharing values with the companies they work for, and are looking for new types of management and work environments. All of this adds up to the makings of an Agile World led by newly-empowered consumers in an evolving economy.

The book gives practical examples of how agile thinking and approaches, as well as a shift in consumer behavior, are changing the brand-consumer relationship with the opportunity for better outcomes for both. As brands become more sophisticated and consumers have an increasing amount of choices, the power dynamic in the brand-consumer relationship has shifted to giving consumers more control than ever before. While this is a shift from the early days of branding and marketing, it is one that provides new opportunities for consumers and positions brands as facilitators of an evolving creative economy. It provides examples of how companies like Procter & Gamble, ING, Google, Betabrand, LEGO, and others are shaping this new dynamic while achieving innovative and profitable outcomes.

The book features a foreword from Lisa Nirell, Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth and author of EnergizeGrowth NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company and The Mindful Marketer: How to Stay Present and Profitable in a Data-Driven World.

The Agile Consumer is the third book in Kihlström's Agile series, which started with 2016's The Agile Web, and continued to 2018's The Agile Brand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543975819

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Greg Kihlström.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written must be obtained by contacting the author. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Published by:

Agile World, LLC

3100 Clarendon Boulevard #200

Arlington, VA 22201

https://theagile.world

First Edition: July 2019

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Edited by Anna-Marie Montague and Janelle Kihlström

Cover Design by Alicia Recco

Copyright: 2019

eBook ISBN - 978-1-54397-581-9

Contents

Contents

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1:  Where we are and how we got here

Chapter 1.1  The evolving consumer

Chapter 1.2  Agile & the evolution of the customer experience

Part 2:  The Agile Consumer

Chapter 2.1  The makings of the agile consumer

Chapter 2.2  The agile consumer and the facilitator-maker relationship

Chapter 2.3  Crowdsourcing and embracing the MVP

Chapter 2.4  Cinematic universes & the network effect

Chapter 2.5  Moving beyond hardware

Chapter 2.6   Social transformation

Part 3:  The agile world

Chapter 3.1  Enter the agile world

Chapter 3.2  The agile company

Chapter 3.3  The agile employee

Chapter 3.4  The agile marketer

Part 4:  Looking forward

Chapter 4.1  The agile future

Chapter 4.2  The agile & exponential enablers

Chapter 4.3  Agile & innovation

Chapter 4.4  The agile economy

Chapter 4.5  Conclusion

Notes

PERFECTION IS ALWAYS THE GOAL

YET IS ALWAYS UNATTAINABLE.

THANK YOU, LINDSEY, FOR

UNDERSTANDING BOTH THIS DESIRE

AND THIS SHORTCOMING IN ME,

AND FOR BEING THE CLOSEST THING

TO PERFECTION IN MY LIFE.

AS BEFORE, THIS IS ALSO DEDICATED

TO EVERYONE WHO HAS

TAUGHT ME WHAT I KNOW.

THERE HAVE ALREADY BEEN,

AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE, MANY.

About the Author

Greg Kihlström is an entrepreneur and strategist that has worked across marketing, technology and creative throughout his career. He is currently Chief Strategy Officer at Cravety, a customer and employee experience agency; Co-Founder of AdapticAI, a data science and AI consulting firm; Co-Founder of Futurefy Events, an events and publishing company; and Co-Founder of digics, a software startup dealing with consumer data privacy issues. He is also the host of The Agile World podcast.

Greg was formerly SVP Experience at Yes&, a marketing agency that works with national commercial, nonprofit, and government clients. Previous to that, he was founder and CEO of Carousel30, an award-winning digital agency he started in 2003 and which was acquired in late 2017 by Yes&. He has worked on digital strategy and marketing projects and campaigns with the world’s top brands such as AOL, Coca-Cola, GEICO, Marriott, Starbucks, Toyota, VW, and the United Nations.

He is currently serving as Chair of the National Innovation Committee for the American Advertising Federation, a member of the Creative Technologies Committee of the 4As, and is a member of the MIT Technology Review Global Panel. He previously served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Industry Mentorship Board (MIMB), the American Advertising Federation District 2 (Mid-Atlantic Region) Board, the Trust for the National Mall’s National Marketing Advisory Board, and the Trust for the George Washington Memorial Parkway’s Board of Trustees.

Greg’s first book, The Agile Web, was published in 2016 and discusses the changing landscape of digital marketing and customer experience as it relates to the practice of designing and developing websites. His second, The Agile Brand (2018), discusses how the consumer-brand relationship has evolved over the years to be more symbiotic and how consumers have taken a larger role in shaping brands values and direction. He followed both of those with Ever Seeking: A History and Future of Search, which discusses how search engines and consumer search behavior has evolved and continues to evolve. He is a regular contributing writer to Forbes and Social Media Today and has written for The Washington Post, Advertising Age, and other publications throughout his career. 

Greg has been named to DC Inno’s 50 on Fire list for innovators in media, marketing & PR in the Washington DC market twice in the last 3 years, and his work has won numerous national and international awards. He has participated as a keynote speaker, panelist and moderator at industry events around the world including Internet Week New York, Internet Summit, EventTech, SMX Social Media, and Social Media Week. He has also guest lectured at several schools including VCU Brandcenter, Georgetown University, American University, University of Maryland, Virginia Commonwealth University, Howard University and Virginia Tech.

Acknowledgements

As is always the case, there are too many people to thank and trying to fit everyone in who has inspired, helped, or otherwise assisted in this effort would be too long a list. I’ll do my best to be exhaustive yet brief.

I’m extremely excited about my latest entrepreneurial forays, and want to thank the teams at Cravety, AdapticAI, Futurefy Events, and digics for their support over the past several months.

The Yes& team has been very supportive of my writing and speaking both on this book and the promotional tour for my last book, The Agile Brand. This is everyone from the leadership to my many fellow employees. 

I want to thank Anna-Marie Montague for her help editing this book, and really shaping several parts that were a bit of a struggle. Her insights and ideas helped turn some overly optimistic (dare I say unrealistic) passages into something that not only passes the BS test, but are more meaningful and actionable than originally written.

Thanks to the very talented Alicia Recco for not only designing the book cover and graphics, but for creating my personal brand identity that I love so much.

There will always be a special place in my heart for the team who came over from my agency Carousel30 to Yes&. Atop that list, Romie Stefanelli has been a good friend, a trusted advisor, and continues to be so.

Lisa Nirell continues to inspire me and I’m very thankful for her contribution of the foreword to this book. She’s a good friend and always a source of great ideas.

I’d also like to thank my interview participants for their insights and, in all cases, their friendships. Ed Bodensiek, John Friedman, Geoff Livingston, Steve Moubray, and Susan Soroko are all amazing people who have inspired me to learn more about their respective areas of expertise.

Thanks to Ernesto Gluecksmann and the Through the Noise team for producing my podcast and assisting with taking the Agile series beyond the printed page. So great to work with such professionals.

My Mom and Dad are the two people who helped shape me most and filled me with the belief that there’s nothing I can’t do if I’m determined and work hard. I’ve never been able to shake that belief, and hope I never do.

Thanks to my sister Janelle for assisting with editing this book as well. It’s so wonderful to have the support of my family, particularly such a talented writer.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my wife Lindsey for her support, patience, understanding, belief in my abilities, and faith that some of my crazy ideas might just turn into something amazing. Every day I am thankful to wake up such a lucky man.

To anyone not mentioned specifically, I apologize for doing so, but I will say that I am truly blessed to have even half the friends, colleagues, and family who support me like you have. I only hope I can return the support you’ve given me.

"Perfection is a road, not a destination.

Every time I live, I get an education."   

Burk Hudson

Foreword

Wegman’s is one of my favorite grocery shopping experiences. Whenever I visit the produce section of the store, I gravitate to the fresh berries. Throughout the year, they sell berries from Chile, Mexico, and California. Wegman’s goes one step further and offers them in a multitude of portions. They also include several shelves of organically grown berries.

While I appreciate the variety of fruit options, I have quickly grown to expect it. Variety and freshness are table stakes in the battle for shoppers. Despite their best efforts, most other grocers cannot hold a candle to Wegmans’ variety and quality.

The same holds true for your customers. They are faced with—and expect—an increasing amount of choice. They expect a multitude of product choices and experiences tailored to their needs—no matter what the season.

Greg’s Agile series of books gives us a window into several aspects of how a more agile world is affecting every one of your customers, and the opportunities it presents.

The Agile Consumer takes a holistic look at the trends, technologies, and other factors affecting today’s consumers. It also shows how these factors change the way the customer of the future will want to interact with your brand. It gives us a window into the future of the brand-consumer relationship based on the motivations and factors affecting consumers. This includes the idea that customers are increasingly willing to be a part of the process of developing ideas, products, and campaigns, and that doing so provides brands with more loyal advocates who are engaged from the start. Greg’s perspective on the power of crowdsourcing, coupled with contemporary examples, will make you think twice about your product marketing, launch, and sales strategies.

By including examples of brands such as ING, Betabrands, GE, and Google, Greg Kihlström illustrates how agile thinking and approaches have changed even the most traditional organizations for the better. These companies report more meaningful connections with their customers and employees.

Several key principles in this book will radically affect your customer relationships:

Organizations are not the only ones that are adopting agile principles. The consumer mindset has shifted to be more collaborative, open, and empowered.

Successful agile companies adopt the principles holistically, not just for a few aspects such as marketing, HR, or management.

Today’s customers are empowered by technology and access to endless volumes of information. Understanding the democratization of data trend will give leaders an edge over competitors.

We are witnessing the beginning stages of a fundamental shift in how consumers and brands relate to one another. This is redefining the roles of marketers and their organizations that they need to perform.

Understanding your agile consumers is no longer a luxury. It’s a condition for doing meaningful, mindful work. Savor each chapter of The Agile Consumer as you would a fresh berry pie, and you will earn their hearts and minds.

Lisa Nirell

Founder, EnergizeGrowth® LLC

Author, The Mindful Marketer and EnergizeGrowth NOW

www.energizegrowth.com

Introduction

"When you aim for perfection,

you discover it’s a moving target."

George Fisher

I think I was born agile. They didn’t have a word for it until long after I entered the world in the late 1970s, but there was something about the way I approached things that often didn’t align with others’ expectations.

By the age of five, I was studying classical piano and, unlike a lot of kids, I actually enjoyed it. Having the discipline to practice every day, an interest in learning about classical music, as well as the aspect of musical performance that allowed me to get up and play for others, I became one of the better pianists in my very small private school. I wasn’t exactly on my way to Carnegie Hall, but I held my own in the small pond I was swimming in.

I always strove for perfection but always felt that I never quite achieved it while playing the piano, despite continual improvement. What I did learn from taking lessons for a little over 11 years was that there is something powerful about practicing the same piece of music again and again and doing iteratively better each time. Learning a piece of music consisted of several things. First, the skill of reading music, and second, learning how to apply a bit of an artistic touch to the piece—knowing how and when to get louder or softer, or to speed up or pause just the right amount for effect. But just as much as those things, it took practice to get it right. You didn’t play a piece of music well the first time, or even the second or third time.

The other thing I learned from studying piano is that as hard as you practice, as much as you play, there’s always someone else willing to push things further and faster. Inevitably, I was eventually overshadowed by other kids who were willing to put in more time than me, who were arguably more talented, and who iterated the quality of their performances more quickly.

My first big lesson (no pun intended) about perfection came from a very large piano competition I attended in my senior year of high school. All throughout my childhood, I was the star pupil at piano, in my small private school world, and in the competitions in which I had participated. It was easy to think a lot of my abilities based on the feedback I had received, awards I had won, and reputation I’d gained in the circles I moved in. No one had ever told me about the concept of big fish in a small pond when I was eleven, though. So when it came time to perform against my peers in the largest competition I had been in thus far, I didn’t just fail to win, I failed to even place. Obviously, perfect in one world wasn’t perfect in others.

So, as any agile person would do, I chose something that built on the concepts I’d already learned, the discipline I had been taught, and applied those ideas in a way that ultimately led to more success. Music had always been a creative outlet for me, but it failed to combine the visual aspect of creativity that I had also always appreciated. What started with a desire to learn design (initially by way of architecture and eventually by graphic and interactive design) ultimately led to a career in a truly agile profession: digital strategy and marketing. This then naturally gave way to my current focus on customer experience. On a long enough timeline, it all makes sense as one thing iterated into another.

How can a person be agile?

Anyone familiar with the term agile already knows that it started (at least in this context) in the software development world in the 1990s, descended from lean manufacturing in the 1960s. So, how does a coding methodology translate to a human? There are a few ways I would define this, which I’ll explain now.

A little ambiguity is okay as long as there’s a goal

I know some people who have a hard time with not knowing exactly what is going on. You must know them too. They are what I refer to as zeroes and ones people, who only deal in black and white and are uncomfortable with grays. They prefer to see the world in terms of what John D. Caputo refers to as "absolute truth1," or the notion that there is only one correct way to believe, and that this one way applies to everyone and everything in the universe.

I’m not one of those people. Much to the contrary, I’ve always considered myself someone who sets their own goals. But I think it’s easy for some of those who lean toward the absolute truth style of thinking to confuse knowing that you’re