Marketing 5.0

CHAPTER 12Agile 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 ...