Marketing 0

REFLECTION QUESTIONS
Explore areas where you can improve the productivity of
your frontline sales and customer service staff. What are
some tasks that can be taken over by a computer system?
How can you empower your frontline staff to make better
decisions? For instance, how can your salespeople use
customer targeting data to improve the sales conversion
rate?

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CHAPTER 12
Agile Marketing: Executing
Operations at Pace and Scale
Zara has been one of the most successful fast-fashion brands in the
last decade. Unlike traditional apparel companies that rely on longer
seasonal trends, Inditex—the owner of Zara brand—is banking on
quick turnaround time with more than 10,000 different designs per
year. Inditex can bring the latest trends from the catwalk to the
storefront in only a couple of weeks. Behind this extraordinary speed
is an agile design and supply chain.
The company monitors trends of celebrity apparel and fashion shows
around the world. It also analyzes the sales of each stock keeping
unit (SKU) at the store level to determine which items have strong
demand in real time, using radio-frequency identification (RFID)
tracking. The market insights dictate decentralized teams of
designers on which items to create. The sourcing is often done
concurrently with the design process, making the process a lot
quicker. Zara products are also made in small batches, ensuring high
inventory turnover while allowing the brand to test market
acceptance before committing to more production volume.
Zara's go-to-market practice is an example of agile marketing. Real-
time analytics, decentralized quick response teams, flexible product
platforms, concurrent processes, and rapid experimentation are all
hallmarks of an agile organization. With this model, the brand has
changed the way people buy clothes and accessories.
But fast-fashion retailing is a polarizing business. Despite having a
strong fan base, the retailers also draw criticism, especially for their
enormous waste and unfair labor practices. An agile organization
must quickly sense and respond to market sentiments. Hence, Zara
announced its support toward the circular economy—continuous use
of materials through reuse and recycle. Zara also pledges that all of
its clothing products will be made from sustainable materials by
2025.

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The biggest test for Zara's agility is how the company will operate in
the post-pandemic world. Zara typically uses its stores as e-
commerce fulfillment centers. With stores temporarily closed during
lockdowns and 1,200 stores to be permanently shut down globally,
the plan needs readjustment. Integration between online and brick-
and-mortar businesses will be the key for the brand in the next
decade.