Because of its significance in company performance, the idea of agility has garnered growing attention from scholars in a variety of business disciplines (Khan, 2020). Agility is defined as a higher-order skill that develops through time (Doz & Kosonen, 2008; Fosso Wamba & Akter, 2019). Agility “allows organisations to acquire, integrate, and restructure resources while positioning themselves competitively in real time” (Vickery, Droge, Setia, & Sambamurthy, 2010, p. 7028). There are just a few definitions of agility in the existing literature. For example, Sharifi and Zhang (1999) describe agility as “taking advantage of opportunities and changes in the marketing environment while dealing with new risks and obstacles.” Others describe it as the capacity to quickly combine the essential information, assets, and contacts in order to capture competitive market opportunities and detect innovative chances (Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj, & Grover, 2003).
Marketing agility enables businesses to adapt swiftly to market changes by concentrating on unanticipated incidents (Osei, Amankwah-Amoah, Khan, Omar, & Gutu, 2019). Homburg, Theel, and Hohenberg (2020) concentrated on quick decision-making and trial and error learning when conceiving marketing agility, whereas Kalaignanam, Tuli, Kushwaha, Lee, and Gal (2021) emphasized sensemaking, iteration, speed, and decisions. Marketing agility, according to Zhou, Mavondo, and Saunders (2019), is a meta dynamic capacity that combines market sense, speed, and flexibility to spot opportunities and respond quickly by reconfiguring marketing techniques in a changing environment. Khan (2020) expands marketing agility by concentrating on understudied dynamic characteristics such as proactive market sensing, response, rapidity, and flexibility.
Furthermore, the existing literature finds four primary characteristics of marketing agility, as stated by Zhou et al. (2019), which is broadly compatible with Homburg et al. (2020), Khan (2020), and Kalaignanam et al. (2021). Firstly, marketing agility is an organizational capability that allows companies to react to changing market conditions better than competitors (Roberts & Grover, 2012). Secondly, marketing agility demonstrates adaptability, quickness, response, and proactivity (Homburg et al., 2020; Sherehiy, Karwowski, & Layer, 2007; Zhang, 2011). Thirdly, marketing agility entails sensemaking and marketing response (Kalaignanam et al., 2021; Roberts & Grover, 2012; Teece et al., 2016) by proactively adjusting resources and settings in response to opportunities and risks (Roberts & Grover, 2012; Teece et al., 2016). Finally, marketing agility varies depending on the circumstance (Roberts & Grover, 2012; Zhou).
Despite the rising relevance of marketing agility in a sharing economy, its implications on marketing effectiveness under the influence of market turbulence have not been thoroughly investigated. Analytics capability management becomes a proactive necessity for organisations operating in the B2B sharing economy setting during periods of intense market turmoil (Akter, Hani, Dwivedi, & Sharma, 2022).
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