Episode Four (English with German version): An interview with Dr. Kevin Anding

English Transcript of the interview between John Cass and Dr. Kevin Anding

00:00:27 John Cass 

Welcome to the deep dive into Agile Marketing podcast with John Cass. I'm your host John Cass here in Boston, MA. Today I'll be interviewing Doctor Kevin Anding, CEO of Connectingscience and marketing specialist. Kevin provides agile marketing advice and agile training to companies. 

Today's podcast is a little different from my normal brand podcast. Instead of interviewing Kevin about his work as a marketer and using agile, the focus is on the state of agile marketing in Germany. Welcome Kevin. 

00:01:00 Kevin Anding 

Welcome, John. Thanks for having me. 

00:01:02 John Cass 

Oh it's great to have you on the podcast and I'm really glad to be able to talk to you in preparing for this call. Today we talked a little bit about your journey into agile marketing. While the focus is on Germany. 

I think we should start with how you got started with agile marketing and what you do in agile marketing actually. 

00:01:20 Kevin Anding 

Yeah, thanks. So I'm working in marketing now for a little bit more than 15 years and I started working for IT and software company. 

This and I did a lot of things, big campaigns and employer branding and especially things for high tech. So my experience from this work is that. 

Really, an agile approach helps you adopt campaigns and get something like I call market wisdom about things going on there. I did a lot of new things, so agile is always a way to find the right methods in marketing. 

Really bring your product into the market in the best way possible. So right now I'm working at a leading software company. 

In Europe for real estate industry and right now I'm managing A transformation process into agile marketing for our marketing department and it's a great journey is what I can tell. 

00:02:14 John Cass 

So tell me about the business culture in Germany. How open are marketers and businesses to the agile approach? 

00:02:21 Kevin Anding  

That's a good question and in preparation for this podcast, I collected some information in the really fantastic blog from Luis Gonzalez about it and he's an agile coach and managing consultant working in Germany for more than nine years and for me, being in German, it is a bit difficult to describe the situation. So, he found the right words for it. So, he says that hierarchy is too dominant in Germany. 

For agile to be processed, yeah, in the right way. So when you compare the situation to Finland or the Netherlands and German culture is a bit different. So we are very traditional and we usually need a long way to innovations. We love planning processes. 

And let's say Germany is like a perfectionist culture, so failure is not something that is well accepted. So there is another thing coming into play when we say, OK, we have especially the big companies with all the matrix organizations and they create interferences with all the silo mindset. 

We have in these bigger companies and the difficult to overcome the political mindset coming to this. So this would be a short description of the culture set up in. 

00:03:39 John Cass 

Germany. So what's your assessment of the level of adoption of our job marketing by companies in? 

00:03:45 Kevin Anding 

Unfortunately, there's only little research on this and I found something from the project Management Institute in Cologne from from 2020 last year and their findings are that and they had a look on all digital projects and processing companies and they say OK, that only one third of our respondents on the survey. 

Implemented agile and they are mostly using agile in an early stage of adoption. So I think the main reason why they do this is to shorten time to market efficiency and this is something very crucial right now. 

And unfortunately, there is no such survey on your marketing, but from my experience agile is used especially in software development of course. And when you think about that, only 1/3 of the respondents use agile and other projects. Then you can imagine how big agile marketing is in Germany. 

So we're right now at a level where we use certain agile techniques. So you think you find things like customer journey mapping, data-driven approaches or things like the processable elements like dailies or reviews in marketing. But from my point of view that you find a lot of consulting companies. 

Bringing agile marketing techniques into companies and they are also the drivers of agile in Germany. I'm thinking right now we have a lot of startups working in agile marketing. They exploring the world of agile marketing and put it this way. 

And with the whole tool set available, then we have let's say medium sized companies that taking their first baby steps in this direction. But in fact you can see there is a huge potential in Germany and especially for those who know how to use the right tools and know how to deal with things like the private Privacy Shield. 

Issues we have right now and all the other things and you have a a good view on adoption of agile in the companies in Germany. 

00:05:43 John Cass 

The automobile industry is what comes to mind when I think about traditional industries in Germany. Have a times are changing and industries have to adopt Agile changing. 

Are car manufacturers a driver of agile and agile marketing in Germany? 

00:05:58 Kevin Anding 

In this context, I love the example of Tesla and VW, and a few weeks ago we had this nice example of the VW CEO Herbert trying using Twitter to address Elon Musk through this platform. And obviously this is something pretty normal for a U.S. company. But for us Germans, it's something pretty new and I think it was the finance representative of the board who just mentioned, is this really a German guy using this thing? 

And I think this is a good example to see how car manufacturers are driver of agile. So we have good examples with corporate communications and agile. So they are picking up things from the news or picking up things on social media and reacting. 

On this, but there is only a few examples of really good campaigns doing agile marketing. 

And I think this has to do with big consultancy companies bringing agile into corporates. So we have small pieces, tools like customer journey mapping or agile print design that really takes place into car industry. But I think coming with the change in certain business models. 

These actual situation is changing right now because with all the digitalization we had, the big diesel crisis in Germany. So I think something has to change like finance industry changed with the big crisis in 2008. So I think two years ago 2019, there was something like they call auto gipfel. It's like a car summit. And they talked about new ways to market the automotive industry. And here they mentioned things like going away from the full funnel product marketing into smarter ways to tackle the customer and to find more customer centric approach to marketing. 

00:07:54 John Cass 

Right, right. So can you tell me about some of the companies who have adopted agile marketing in Germany? 

00:08:01 Kevin Anding 

Of course you can find perfect examples in Germany and two state two there is for example the auto group auto group is a Big e-commerce company. You find Eng Dbar which is a big finance company. Also ALDI and telecom. So they are also all good examples of agile in Germany but and you have a have a closer look on this and I don't want to mention these four. Let's talk about 6th or the bellina fakers, but then you see, they most often do things like news jacking. So they really try to adopt their communication strategy to things happening in the news right now, and there are only a few organizations like Auto Group for example, which is the biggest German e-commerce company and they see Agile as a cultural change program that also drives their communication and marketing and with auto group media for example. They made their data-driven advertising. 

To also a business model and especially Corona in this sense, acts like a catalyst to foster this digital change. 

00:09:09 John Cass 

What about finance companies? Why do you think we see such early adoption there? 

00:09:15 Kevin Anding 

I think with the big financial crisis in 2008, most of the institutions lost their business model. So here the crisis acted as a catalyst, like The thing is happening for the automotive industry right now in these industry we can find good examples like ING Dbar, which cost themselves the first agile. Think of Germany, which is really interesting and they created also something their own agile way of working and combined with their orange code of conduct, which is really interesting. And I know from my work as an agile coach that a lot of suppliers of these financial institutes follow their direction and if I had to predict the future after Corona, I would say that also the German industries like automotive or electronical industry, they have to adopt Agile to win the next global race on customers. I think at least in the BTC. 

00:10:06 John Cass 

Area how are companies deploying agile in Germany? What? What different types of adoption have you seen? You know, is it scrum? Kanban. Hybrid. 

00:10:16 Kevin Anding 

I think from my point of view you can what you can see is mostly cherry picking on agile methods. So I think it has to firstly suit their individual needs and then they have to find the right tools so you can find all the things like really companies using common boards, doing design sprints or. 

Having these what I said user journey mapping, but to make something clear just using Kanban boards does not make a company agile and also not a marketing department. 

00:10:45 John Cass 

And how are C-Suite leaders reacting to the adoption of our agile marketing? You know, is the more transparency and communication between the marketing department and C-Suite leaders? 

00:10:56 Kevin Anding 

Yeah, I think transparency is crucial in agile marketing, especially when you have a data-driven approach that helps marketers to communicate their role in. 

This overall company value creation process, and I think it's very much dependent on the business model and in which way for example, customer centricity comes into place also on the page of a sea level leader. And if this makes a difference in terms of communications and transparency internally and. 

00:11:25 John Cass 

In Germany, what organizations are supporting agile marketing? Could you name some podcasts or organizations? 

00:11:32 Kevin Anding 

Yeah, I can very much recommend a page they call themselves onlinemarketing.de. They have the latest news on digital marketing and there are various providers for seminars and things like this, like the German Institute of Marketing, which is a marketing consultancy, and what I find very useful are insights on agile marketing by leading consultancies like the big Four or some else. Unfortunately, there is no exclusive podcast on Agile marketing. 

But hey, maybe with connecting science it could be one in the future and would be keen to know if there is a certain interest in this. So please also let me know on LinkedIn or Twitter. 

00:12:10 John Cass 

Excellent, excellent, Kevin. So what do you think is the future for agile marketing in Germany? 

00:12:16 Kevin Anding 

Let's put it this way. I think of course there is one and I want to. I would be very happy to have drive this change and for me personally I see great potential especially with Corona and Corona driving digitalization in Germany. 

00:12:29 John Cass 

Well, great. Well, Kevin, this has been a great interview. I'd lovely to hear about what's going on with our job marketing in Germany. I really appreciate you joining us today. 

00:12:38 Kevin Anding 

Thank you, John, was fun. 

00:12:40 John Cass 

This is John Cass and now we are going to have the German version of this podcast, which is basically myself giving the questions in English and then Kevin giving the German translation in terms of the questions and then also his.