If you follow the ad industry at all, you’ve almost certainly seen article after article championing those who’ve leaned into their brand purpose amidst the pandemic. Some go as far to encourage brands to find purpose–and while purpose is certainly important, many brands that claim to be purpose-driven still miss the mark, failing to drive real, visible impact. This can easily backfire, leading to criticism of exploiting societal challenges for their own gain, like accusations of greenwashing.

“During this time, this idea of whether brands helped, how they turned up and whether they’ve done the right thing has taken hold,” says MediaMonks Founder Wesley ter Haar. “That’s about responsibility: can you take on a role that is more meaningful than a nebulous idea of brand purpose?” That notion of responsibility is key. Brands that have made headlines in their response to COVID-19 didn’t always center their role around their purpose; instead, they’ve shown up in other ways by innovating to fill the societal cracks that the pandemic had exposed.

David Rotman, Editor-at-Large of MIT Technology Review, writes in his assessment of the overall COVID-19 response that, “We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy.”

His point highlights a real problem in brands’ ability to pivot resources and rapidly innovate when new problems arise. While purpose may be important for a brand to have, it’s this ability to step up and support consumers—and broader audiences—when and where it matters most that has become so critical today.

The fundamental disconnect rests between the purpose exhibited in some brands’ everyday messaging versus the way they do business, exposing a difference between brands that have only recently begun to consider a higher purpose versus those that were born from a need to change the world for the better. Ter Haar explains this pitfall succinctly: “Those brands chase after purpose but don’t have it as a real driver of the organization.”

Turning Words into Action

To identify how your brand can identify and fulfill its role, look beyond a vague or broad sense of purpose and instead focus on specific actions that make sense for the brand given its value prop or resources. We saw many brands show up this way, like AB InBev and Ford, who shifted factory production and supply chains to bottle hand sanitizer and make ventilators, respectively.

But brands don’t have to always make such heavy lifting to make impact. Headspace is a smaller brand that has done well by offering a free collection of meditations to everyone: “weathering the storm,” which is tailored specifically for the reality we’re in right now. Even more importantly, it’s offering free access to its entire library for the unemployed and for healthcare professionals. While these are simple maneuvers, they do well to deliver on Headspace’s promise to make guided meditation accessible for everyone.

Ensuring that purpose permeates every part of the organization is critical—not just messaging, but also in the purchase experience (like the “buy one, give one” model popularized by Toms Shoes) and how it treats its employees. As arbiter of the brand-customer relationship, this means CMOs must have a seat at the table to collaborate with other leaders of the organization more closely. But ter Haar notes that founder-led organizations like Airbnb, who had to lay off workers earlier this year in response to the travel industry being brought to its knees, made the best of a difficult situation by connecting laid off employees with new job opportunities.

“It was a great reflection of their marketing purpose. They managed to do it in a way that strengthened the brand,” says ter Haar. “Marketing is such a reflective part of how they position as a brand—and that’s where marking should be. If you have a strong brand perception, it’s in everything you do.”

Lay a Foundation to Build the Brand Role

For many brands, the ability to execute its role is also directly related to its digital maturity and agile capabilities. Having a strong foundation in both allows them to identify opportunities to support consumers in new ways and reallocate resources to execute those initiatives quickly.

A great example of this is the Boost with Facebook content series. Facebook has long hosted events for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and had reached out to our team in Sao Paulo to create the experiential portion of their upcoming events local to the region. When COVID-19 struck, the team had to quickly pivot the programming to a digital setting. “As their partner, we considered how we could quickly pivot to meet their audience where they were online and tailor the content for that new format,” says Carolina Brandao, Senior Film Producer at MediaMonks.

While the original purpose of the event was to train attendees in using Facebook’s marketing tools, the digital version switched gears to also include resources that could help SMBs survive and thrive through the pandemic. Programming takes the form of live panels as well as live-to-tape spots—all directed remotely—that bring together local politicians and leadership from bigger brands, offering broad insights and support to SMBs. Our team in Sao Paulo handled content for all of South America, including programming in both Spanish and Portuguese.

“This project is a perfect example of how MediaMonks was able to change, adapt and help our client create completely new solutions,” says Brandao. “One week before, we weren’t doing remote shoots or livestreams yet, but we were able to pull that off successfully.” Brandao is also proud of the tangible effect that the content has for the SMBs that rely on Facebook for marketing and connecting to consumers. “In the end, this is actually helping someone who is going through a really tough moment to get their feet on the ground and get the right resources.”

For brands that are more siloed, it can be difficult to make such a quick transition. But just like with any initiative to become more agile, a simple solution is to experiment with organizing small, multi-talented teams. By refreshing the existing structure and building urgency around fast solutions—privileging speed over perfection—your teams can rapidly prototype and build new solutions as they arise.

While purpose is important for offering a waypoint or a path for the brand to move toward, it’s this agile response that becomes critical to fulfilling its role. Once a brand is properly prepared, it is better positioned to show up and tangibly build value at speed—and directly support audiences, no matter what form that takes.

From brand role to transforming digital experiences, it’s time to (re)activate customer obsession.

Today’s brands must be more agile than ever. For one, there’s the need to produce always-on, personalized content at scale to continually engage audiences with relevance. Add to that the many different touchpoints that marketeers must support with a consistent and coherent brand image, and it’s clear that they face a real need in developing more efficient ways of working internally or collaborating with external partners.

Many have found success with the SCRUM process. Originally a product development teamwork strategy, it has since inspired ways of working on a variety of tasks, including creative. Its popularity is in its agile process designed for adaptive problem-solving, in which projects are broken down into a series of short-term tasks (called “sprints”) to be completed within a month or quicker. This process enables teams to frequently assess mistakes to avoid in the future, continually optimize processes and switch gears at a moment’s notice when new needs arise.

SCRUM is a popular agile method, but it’s not the only one. In fact, at MediaMonks we operate in a structure that we call Accountable Agile, in which trust is placed at the fore of the relationship. It combines the best from a handful of processes like SCRUM and Waterfall to provide some added flexibility to how we work alongside brands. And the “accountable” in Accountable Agile isn’t just lip service; it guarantees we can provide the highest-quality product to brands by operating within the model that works best for them. Below are some of the considerations we take to ensure smooth, efficient operations and quality of service.

Set the Pace That Benefits Your Organization

Some organizations hear about the agile process and think that it means they can quickly innovate by supporting any new idea on short notice—but this approach is messy, if not unsuccessful, and isn’t at all what agile is about. While the agile process is designed to help organizations become more flexible, its success ironically results from its heavily organized and strategic structure, requiring organizations take some steps to prepare themselves for agile collaboration.

The process must begin by first identifying where your organization currently stands in its resources and organizational structure, which helps your partner begin planning how to best organize teams that fit. Take supermarket chain Jumbo for instance: its website and apps were handled by different teams, with only the website being supported in-house. As they sought to unify both environments in-house, we helped support by integrating UX and design team members directly into their development operations.

We organized efforts to make the most efficient use of resources while Jumbo scaled up their IT team. At first, the UX and design teams operated within their own silo to service all digital solutions. As the in-house team grew, we began transitioning UX and design into dedicated, multidisciplinary teams. The lockstep approach shows how brands can evolve their operations at their own pace.

On that note, brands that are just beginning to embrace an agile process must also consider how the initiative will integrate and work with other sides of the organization. Business Monk Joeri Lambert notes that “The rest of the organization may not be thinking agile yet,” and seeking approval from stakeholders across the organization—marketing, sales, operations and more—risks slowing down the overall process. That’s why Lambert says it is essential to have a project manager within your organization who has the power to approve within the sprint system.

Embrace the Iterative Process

So now that you know how a partner can help your team grow into an agile process, what about the flip side of the equation—how does it actually build upon a creative idea or business need? The sprint-based agile process is well equipped to iterate upon ideas, or even reorient into another direction by taking learnings from a post-mortem review.

Jumbo has a sizeable selection of wine and beer—so much that the supermarket’s customers could easily feel overwhelmed if they’re unsure what would pair with tonight’s dinner or fit their tastes. Jumbo wanted us to produce a beer and wine finder that would recommend a selection of drinks based on users’ responses to a handful of simple questions. Our UX and design personnel worked within their teams to produce the questionnaire.

But the process didn’t end upon the questionnaire’s completion; it was only the first level. We knew that the tool could become more personalized based on whether the user was a novice or an aficionado, changing the questions based on initial responses. For example, you might ask a novice whether they prefer something fruity or dry—but a seasoned wine drinker might have more specific tastes. “This was too advanced to implement in the first step,” says Lambert, “so we gave everyone a taste of it, and slowly grew towards a more advanced method of questioning.” This is a process that we call “zero-to-one”: rather than boil the ocean with a level-10 experience, we start small to yield quick results for brands, which they can then use to gain buy-in and ladder up to larger, longer-term goals.

Just like with scaling up operations, iterating and improving upon a creative idea requires your partner to really understand and identify the goals you have in mind through your agile efforts. This requires close, continual alignment between parties. “To set up such a project, you need to onboard someone with more expertise than a salesperson,” says Lambert. “With our production experience, we’re well capable of helping a client go ten steps faster, but it requires taking the time to sit in a room to discuss rather than sell.”

Getting into the Agile Mindset

Many brands face an innovation imperative: the reality that they must continually improve their user experience by embracing new, often experimental technologies—and that they must do so quickly. But those who want to innovate must be prepared for a constant state of learning and experimentation. As MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar says, “Real innovation lies in learning how to start matching your products and services to evolve with user behavior.”

A flexible partner can help you grow into a more agile operational setup by helping you translate business outcomes into actionable goals. “You’re helping the internal organization to begin to think more agile,” says Lambert on the role that MediaMonks plays in its SCRUM processes. “We help them gather these challenges and bring these stakeholders together.”

Agile and planning go hand-in-hand.