AGILITY IN MARKETING: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

. Research on agility in marketing has been shaped by a great number of articles published in recent decades. My research contributes to the literature by examining the basis of different intellectual frameworks and by identifying relevant references, authors, topics, and journals for the matter. With this focus, I used bibliometric techniques to investigate over 1,200 articles published between 1992 and 2022. I regarded publication periods that shaped the progression of the research subject. Results show that there are 75 relevant publications. Those could be divided into three research streams. The first stream considers frameworks and agile supply chains, the second IT infrastructure to improve enterprise agility, and the third enterprise and organizational agility in general. I applied a historical perspective, identified the social, intellectual, and conceptual structure of marketing agility research.


Introduction
In the recent past agility has gained a lot of attention in business, especially in innovations and research and development (Beck et al., 2001).Sometimes the impression arises that agility is considered as "the answer" to today's economic challenges.But is this the case?And if yes, for all disciplines?Because digitalization and globalization have expanded, today's work environment has changed significantly and is often referred to as the VUCA world (Mack, 2016).This means the world has increased in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.Agility is a mindset that aims to provide solutions for problems of this VUCA world.Its origins are described in the manifesto for agile software development (Beck et al., 2001).Even though in the beginning it emerged from the software industry, the principles are successfully transferred to a strategic and organizational level.This is called strategic agility or organizational agility (Teece et al., 2016;Weber & Tarba, 2014).As consumers change their purchasing behaviors in the VUCA world, not only organizations but marketing has to adapt.Hence, marketing

Literature review
Agility is an attitude that entails a variety of methods.Its roots are in the software industry, as stated in the agile manifesto (Beck et al., 2001).The authors propose four values that help building better software.The first value is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools".The second value is "working software over comprehensive documentation".The third value is "customer collaboration over contract negotiation" while the fourth value is "responding to change over following a plan".The authors emphasize that the first aspect respectively should be valued more than the second, but that both are important.This attitude has proven successful in the software industry (Moniruzzaman & Hossain, 2013) but it is important not only to unrelatedly adapt an agile framework off the shelf but to incorporate the agile mindset.This is referred to as not only "doing agile" but also "being agile" (Kruchten, 2013).
Other organizational domains have recently adopted agility.Firstly, there is strategic agility.This is the ability to take advantage of changes in how resources are used in a thoughtful and deliberate way.In the same time the organization is quick and nimble, rather than held back by pre-made plans and business models (Doz, 2020).Secondly, scholars refer to organizational agility.It is a company's ability to deal with rapid, unpredicted changes and thrive in a competitive environment where opportunities change continually and unpredictably (Lu & Ramamurthy, 2011).Thirdly, there is agile manufacturing.This is a new way of manufacturing that emphasizes small, modular factories and quick operations that can deal with turbulence and change (Cao & Dowlatshahi, 2005).Fourthly, researchers consider supply chain agility.That is the ability of a supply chain to quickly adapt or respond to changes in the market (Swafford et al., 2006).
Organizations as well have become agile in marketing.This concept is referred to as marketing agility (Kalaignanam et al., 2021).Even though there are both organizational as well as marketing perspectives that are related to marketing agility, the concept itself has received little attention so far.
Looking from the organizational perspective on marketing agility, firstly dynamic capabilities can be stressed.This means the company's processes for using resources are used to keep up with and even make changes in the market.Thus, dynamic capabilities are the organizational and strategic routines that help businesses change their resource arrangements as markets emerge, collide, and split up.They also help businesses change their resource arrangements as markets evolve and die (Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000).Secondly, ambidexterity pops up.It is an organization's ability to be efficient and aligned with today's business needs while also being able to adapt to changes in the environment (Raisch & Birkinshaw, 2008).Thirdly, improvisation is mentioned as how well composition and execution work together as time goes on (Moorman & Miner, 1998).Fourthly, there is the concept of design thinking.It is a creative and strategic process that has the following characteristics: abductive reasoning, iterative thinking and experimentation, a holistic perspective, and a focus on people (Beverland et al., 2015).
Looking from a marketing perspective on marketing agility there are four aspects to be stressed.Firstly, scholars discuss adaptive marketing capabilities as vigilant market research, flexible experimentation, and "open" marketing that uses flexible partner resources (Day, 2011).Secondly, there is market-focused strategic flexibility.It is the company's ability and desire to create firm-specific real options for the configuration and reconfiguration of customer value propositions that are significantly better than those of its competitors (Johnson et al., 2003).Thirdly, there is market orientation.It means, across the whole company, there is a lot of information about what customers want now and in the future.This information is shared across departments, and the whole company responds to this information (Jaworski & Kohli, 1993).Fourthly, there is market-based organization learning, a core ability that deals with aspects outside of the company that is not as visible as most of the organizational learning skills that are focused on inside the company (Sinkula et al., 1997).
My literature review shows on the one hand, that research on marketing agility is scarce and the concept is young.On the other hand, there are related agile concepts from organizational and marketing perspective that are closely associated and partially overlapping.I see that as an indication that several research streams on marketing agility exist and the concept is shaped through different knowledge bases.Therefore, I provide this bibliometric analysis of the research field to facilitate structure and focus.

Methodology
My research objective was to understand which concepts and research streams shape marketing agility.Hence, I conducted a bibliometric analysis as it examines bibliographical elements quantitatively.I followed the steps suggested by Aria and Cuccurullo (2017).Those are data collection, data analysis and data visualization.

Data collection
I collected data from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (https://www.webofscience.com).Web of Science (WoS) is a multidisciplinary electronic database providing bibliographic metadata from peer reviewed papers since 1945.It covers 1.9 billion cited references from over 171 million records and 18,000 journals and a broad band of different disciplines (Clarivate Analytics, 2022).WoS is "an indispensable citation database" (Meho & Yang, 2007).I browsed WoS by the following term: TS = ((agil*) and (marketing)) and Articles (Document Types) and English or German or Czech (Languages).
By this term I extracted articles in English, German or Czech that contain both the words agil, agility and familiar ones and marketing in the title, abstract, keywords and keywords plus.I decided to use knowledge that is published in peer reviewed journals since it is considered "certified knowledge" (Ramos-Rodríguez & Ruíz-Navarro, 2004).As a result, I got a dataset consisting of 1,290 articles published between 1992 and 2022.Their citations ranged between 0 and 1,189.I exported the data and imported it to bibliometrix, an R-tool for bibliometric analysis.I used R as a 64-bit Version on Windows in Version 4.1.0.and combined it with R studio and activated the package biblioshiny for bibliometrix.Further filtering of the data was conducted in biblioshiny aiming at excluding articles that have not been cited frequently.Therefore, minimum citations are set to 3. Hence, the amount of data diminished to 860 articles.Based on a reading of the titles and abstracts, I could exclude irrelevant articles for my research objective.For example, I excluded research that focused on logistics management.In this way I could reduce the dataset to 75 relevant articles that describe the research area.

Data analysis and visualization
For data analysis I both entailed descriptive analysis and network extraction.I described my chosen visualisation in this chapter, simultaneously.For a detailed overview of bibliometric methods see Aria and Cuccurullo (2017).
Descriptively, I analyzed the production of papers over the time and identified the most important journals, authors and articles for marketing agility based on either the number of publications or h-index.The h-index was initially proposed by Hirsch (2005) and is an index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher or in this case source.Hirsch (2005) defines the h-index as follows: "A scientist has index h if h of his or her N p papers have at least h citations each and the other (N p -h) papers have ≤ h citations each." (Hirsch, 2005).By example, an h-index of 12 of an author or a journal would mean, there had been 12 articles published that received at least 12 citations each.Therefore, it considers both quality and quantity of a researcher's output.
By network extraction I analyzed collaborating countries, clusters of journals, articles, and keywords.I analyzed countries with a collaboration network, while I clustered journals with co-citation analysis.This means I clustered journals based on which journals they are citing.For articles I did the same, but additionally applied bibliographic coupling.This means, I clustered those documents that are cited together and labelled the clusters based on relevant keywords.I could then sort the clusters in a four fields matrix with the dimension's centrality and impact.As citation analysis offers the most valuable impact, if a historical perspective is included, I provide a historical direct citation map.It shows across a time dimension who is basing their research on whom.Finally, I analyzed topics based on keywords.Keyword analysis is the only bibliographic method that is actually considering the content of works.Therefore, it offers a semantic map the facilitates to understand the conceptual structure of research (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017).Hence, I built a co-occurrence networking of keywords that are used together in research.2019) even had a basis of 1,876 articles in their study on digital transformation.To understand my topic of interest from different points of view I analyzed the publications per year for a historical perspective, the collaboration countries for a social structure, the productivity of journals and authors productivity for an intellectual structure and finally the topics for a conceptual structure.

Publications per year
The articles I studied were from 1989 to 2021.As shown in Figure 1, the publication stream can be divided into three stages for discussion.There is a first period from 1989 to 2006 where research is scarce.This is the usual pioneering phase, where research is seminal for an emerging topic (Danvila-del-Valle et al., 2019).In the second period from 2007 to 2018, research increased, tremendously.In the two peaks in 2009 and 2014, there are up to seven times of publications compared to the first phase.In the third phase from 2019 to 2021, the publications emerged almost explosively.Even though, the period covers only three years 43 publications were contributed to this phase.This is 57.3% of all publications.This indicates that research interest raised significantly.As a result, understanding the conceptual, intellectual and social structure gains in importance.This can be done by looking at publication countries and languages.

Countries and languages of production
In this study I focused on articles that are published in English, German and Czech as it offers me access for qualitative examinations.In the filtered dataset of 75 articles, 74 are written in English and one in German.33 countries contributed to marketing agility.Figure 2 shows clusters of collaborating countries based on the nationalities of the authors.The closer the nodes are, the more they cooperated.The map reveals three geographical and cultural clusters of collaboration.The most dominant cluster is concentrated around the United Kingdom showing collaborations with the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy.The second cluster is built around China, representing collaborations with Singapore and Australia.The third cluster shows a collaboration between Sweden and Finland.In my view, there are two resulting consequences from the cluster building.First, the in depth-research of the subject is facilitated as cultural perspectives can be integrated more easily.Secondly, the research agenda is enriched as possible collaborations between not yet represented countries may arise.In other words, I want to promote international collaborations because I believe they advance field knowledge.

Journal productivity
The articles were published in 58 journals, while only 11 of them published two or more articles.Table 1 provides an overview of the 20 most contributing journals sorted by Hirsch-index (Hirsch, 2005).Also, the table contains the number of articles on marketing agility as well as the citations they received from the studies published.
The most contributing journal is the Journal of Business Research with seven articles.Contrary to other disciplines, it is not the journal that is publishing for the longest time on marketing agility as the first publication arose in 2007.Four of their publications are from the years 2019 to 2021.The International Journal of Production Economics is an old hand in the field, as they started contribution in 1999.As common in other disciplines in this way they rank in the top (second rank).Journals ranked in places 3 to 11 contributed two articles, while all other journals published one relevant article for marketing agility.
In Figure 3 I present a co-citation network of the contributing journals.In this way I could understand

Authors' productivity
199 single authors contributed to the dataset I analyzed.
In Table 2 I listed the most prolific ones ranked by their total citations.I want to stress that against expectations not those that started contributing early received the most citations, because the three most cited authors contributed one paper together in 2013.Apparently, it's not the early bird that catches the worm, it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.Chakravarty et al. (2013) analyze in their study two roles of information technology competences sha ping organizational agility and firm performance in the context of B2B electronic marketplaces.They show that IT competencies have an enabling role that enhance entrepreneurial and adaptive organizational agility.As well they have a facilitating role that enhances firm performance by helping the implementation of requisite entrepreneurial supply chains in real world context.I provide further qualitative analysis in the analysis of keywords and articles.

Reference analysis
In addition to the analysis of authors I also analyzed the references they cited.In this way I could draw an intellectual map of marketing agility.Firstly, I provide an overview of the 20 most cited articles in Table 3.Secondly, I built content wise clusters by document coupling and labelled the clusters with keywords the authors used.I could sort them in a four fields matrix according to their centrality and impact for the topic as shown in Figure 4.
The clusters by documents coupling show which articles are cited together and which keywords are dominant in each cluster.Additionally, I provide the view which articles cite the same reference.This is displayed in Figure 5, a co-citation map of references.The map helps to visualize that there are four clusters.I review those articles, that have the highest closeness and betweenness.Closeness indicates how close a node is to others in the network and is a measure of influence of a node in a network.Betweenness indicates how much a node is connected to other nodes in the network.The more a node lies between to other nodes, the more it affects the relationship between those comparable to a mediator variable in a structural equation model (Ni et al., 2011).
In the cluster in the north of the map (Figure 5), Jaworski and Kohli (1993) focus in antecedents and consequences of market orientation.They ask the questions, why some organizations are more market-oriented than others, what effect market orientation has on employees and business performance and if the linkage between market orientation and business performance depends on environmental variables.Two national samples indicate that market orientation is associated with top management and adaptive actions.Mason-Jones and Towill (1999) provide an older study which might explain their high citation count.Nevertheless, it received a lot of attention.They focus on agility as using market knowledge and a virtual corporation to exploit profitable opportunities in a volatile marketplace and provide steps to implement agile emphasis on the orientation, top managers' risk aversion, interdepartmental conflict and connectedness, centralization, and reward system orientation.Additionally, the findings indicate that a market orientation is associated with overall (judgmental) business performance (but not with market share), employee commitment to the organization, and esprit de corps.Finally, the relationship between market orientation and performance appears to be robust across a range of environmental contexts marked by varying degrees of market turbulence, competitive intensity, and technological turbulence.
In the eastern cluster of the map, there is the research of Lin et al. (2006).They focus on agile supply chains as a factor for today's fast paced business.They find, agile supply chains are the dominant vehicle for competitive advantage.Adopting an agile supply chain, they ask the questions, what is agility and how can it be measured?Additionally, how can agility be achieved and enhanced effectively?Due to the ambiguity inherent in agility assessment, most measures are subjectively described using linguistic terms.Thus, their study uses fuzzy logic to develop a fuzzy agility index (FAI) based on agility providers.The FAI is composed of attribute ratings and associated weights that are aggregated using a fuzzy weighted average.
In the south cluster, I focus on the study of Doz and Kosonen (2010).They propose a management agenda for embedding strategic agility.According to their research, strategic discontinuities and disruptions necessitate changes to business models.However, efficient firms naturally evolve business models that are more stableand thus more rigid -over time.They state, resolving this contradiction can be facilitated by focusing on three core meta-capabilities that contribute to an organization's agility: strategic sensitivity, leadership cohesion, and resource fluidity.In their article they discuss the underlying determinants of these capabilities, drawing on extensive research conducted in multiple companies that were reimagining their business models -their examples include Nokia, easyGroup, HP, SAP, and Kone.Doz and Kosonen (2010) propose a set of concrete leadership actions that enable the meta-capabilities required to accelerate business model renewal and transformation.To organize their argument, they borrow the three central dimensions of their earlier work's strategic agility framework and create corresponding vectors of leadership actions, each of which can help a firm renew its business models.
Finally, in the western cluster I review the work of Sambamurthy et al. (2003).They state, in today's business environments, agility is critical for firms' innovation and competitive performance.Businesses are increasingly relying on information technologies to improve their agility, including process, knowledge, and communication technologies.The purpose of their paper is to increase awareness of the strategic role of information technology by examining the nomological network of influences that IT has on firm performance.They use a multitheoretic lens to argue that information technology investments and capabilities influence firm performance through three critical organizational capabilities (agility, digital options, and entrepreneurial alertness) and strategic processes (capability building, entrepreneurial action, and coevolutionary adaptation).Additionally, they argue that these dynamic capabilities and strategic processes influence firms' ability to launch numerous and diverse competitive actions, which are a significant predictor of firm performance.Through their theorizing, they highlight the critical and reframed  loudis and Valavanis (2002).They propose and present a knowledge-based framework as a possible solution for measuring and assessing manufacturing agility.To calculate an enterprise's overall agility, the authors propose a set of quantifiable agility parameters and classify it into production, market, people, and information infrastructures.The resulting fused measure combines the individual and grouped infrastructure agility parameters, as well as their variations, into a single calculated value of overall agility.Secondly, there is the research of Mason-Jones and Towill (1999).I have already presented their research on agile supply chains in chapter 3.4 as they are the second most prolific authors.This applies as well to Chakravarty et al. (2013), the third fundament that is presented in the historic direct citation network.Fourthly, there is the research of Poolton et al. (2006).They examine the application of principles for agile manufacturing to marketing strategy, planning and management in the context of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs).They show in their case study that innovations in "agile marketing" unlocked latent capacity and developed a strategic marketing plan to win new business.Following up, they discovered that four new customers had been recruited, with the potential for developing long-term relationships with them.The company recognized this proactive approach as a cost-effective strategy for business growth, as was the plan's ease of reconfiguration when new market niches were to be targeted.

Topics on marketing agility
To offer a perspective that considers the actual content of the papers, I present a co-occurrence map of keywords in Figure 7.The map shows three clusters of keywords that co-occur.The first cluster in the north-east of the map contains keywords that are related to "performance" and "capabilities".They are related to a research stream, that focuses on supply chain and the design of systems and frameworks.The second cluster in the south contains keywords like "dynamic capabilities" and "firm performance".The focus of those studies is on the agility of enterprises and organizations.The third cluster in the east of the map

Conclusions
As far as I know this is the first empirical and quantitative literature review on marketing agility that has been done yet.I analyzed 1,290 articles and extracted 75 relevant ones for the topic of marketing agility.Those articles can be divided into three research streams.The first stream considers frame works and agile supply chains, the second IT infrastructure in order to enhance the agility in enterprises and the third stream focuses on enterprise or organizational agility.Biblio metric analysis might sometimes be considered irrelevant as readers might assume that old papers have most citations, and this is the key message.Firstly, in my paper this is not the case and secondly, I more over built clusters that show different perspectives on marketing agility with a historical perspective as well.Hence, future researchers of marketing agility will have a point of contact where to relate their research to.This can concentrate the focus of research.Regarding future research, I did not find a study that analyzes agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban in relation to team effectiveness in marketing departments.Verwijs and Russo (2021) recently proposed a scale to measure scrum team effectiveness that offers promising chances.This should be applied in marketing research to measure if the application of agile methods has positive impacts on the effectiveness of marketing teams.My study offers most value for the scientific community, but for managers it might as well broaden the view.My paper can be a starting point, when organizations consider to not only "do agile", but "be agile" as it shows perspectives on marketing agility that can be cultivated.

I
received 75 articles using data extraction and reduction.This indicates that marketing agility has received little scientific attention to date.For comparison, Danvila-del-Valle et al. (2019) used 931 articles to analyze human resource training.Fetscherin and Usunier (2012) had a basis of 264 articles, when they analyzed corporate branding and Hausberg et al. (

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Articles on marketing agility per year

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Collaborating countries map closeness and the relationships among them as well as pinpoint where the journals "that set the tone" are located.The map shows three clusters representing silos of knowledge.In each cluster there are one or two journals that set the tone and other more specific journals pivoting around them.Closeness represents how much they are co-cited and the size of the node the number of contributions.The first cluster in the top of the map signifies contributions from management perspective such as Strategic Management Review, Academic Management Review, Harvard Business Review and Journal of Marketing.The second cluster rotating clockwise pivots mostly around the Journal of Business Research and contains both information technology research interests as well as leadership topics e.g., Long Range Planning or European Journal of Information Systems.The third cluster rotating clockwise again is shaped by International Journal of Production Economics.This cluster focuses on an operations and industrial perspective e.g., Industrial Marketing Management or Journal of Operations Management.

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Co-citation.Map of cited references

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Historical direct citation network

Table 1 .
Journals with publications on marketing agility ranked by h-index

Table 2 .
Most prolific authors

Table 3 .
Most cited articles Figure 4. Clusters by documents coupling