Agile Brand

Definition

An Agile Brand is an organization that is able to be adaptive to both external (market and customer-driven) and internal (employee and culture-driven) change while maintaining a consistent focus on business and customer growth.

From The Agile Brand Revisited (2025):

A brand is more than just a logo; it is a living, evolving relationship with consumers, built on a unique vocabulary and genuine interactions. The core components of a strong brand are substance, focus, and relevance. These elements ensure that a brand stands for something meaningful, targets the right audience, and stays connected to changing consumer needs and preferences.

—Greg Kihlström

This is generally driven by the formal adoption of Agile principles, though the two are not mutually exclusive.

The Principles of an Agile Brand

Agile Brand Principles include the following:

  1. Agility by design: Understand that change is the only constant; build to change.
  2. Continuously improving: Understanding when evolution vs. revolution is needed; Identify when evolutionary vs. revolutionary approaches are needed.
  3. Operationalizing adaptivity: Make adaptivity and collaboration part of your culture; embrace change, don’t avoid it.
  4. Guided by values: Stay true to your values no matter what; respect customers and their data; respect employees and their time.
  5. Building relationships: Focus on the customer relationship, not the individual transactions. It’s not about channels and mediums; it’s about customer experience.
  6. Focusing on the conversation: Listen to your customers and your employees; don’t talk at them. Love the dialogue; there is always something to learn from it.
  7. Always learning and growing: Have the humility to acknowledge room for improvement; Create opportunities for better ideas; Continuously learn. Continuously improve.

The Concept of The Agile Brand

This concept was introduced in The Agile Brand (2018) by Greg Kihlström, and refined further in The Agile Brand Revisited (2025), also by Greg Kihlström.

Resources

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