As a veteran of the Total Quality Management (TQM) movements begun in the mid-eighties, I was more than a little skeptical when I heard about a group applying the latest version of TQM – Six Sigma to marketing. The group – MarketingNPV publishes a journal and offers seminars and workshops on topics that help Chief Marketing Officers use better processes, proven practices and simple analytic tools to make better decisions.
My skepticism was based upon the amount of uncertainty encountered in marketing. Rather than trying to reduce uncertainty, FIRSTmaneuver is designed to embrace and exploit uncertainty (see our piece on organic command and control – click here to request). One of the primary objectives of any TQM initiative is to drive failure rates to zero. And in doing so put in place processes and disciplines designed to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability. The folks at MarketingNPV describe mapping and measurement as the two pillars of Six Sigma.
One of the six critical vulnerabilities of contemporary marketing organizations (as described in our FIRSTmaneuver Briefing – click here to request) is a focus on reducing the wrong costs and building the wrong infrastructure. Traditional advertising, marketing and branding doctrine is still based upon naming a product, designing a logo, writing a tag line, then creating various communication elements to voice a tightly scripted message via various media. Typically the MARCOM department will try to allocate the lion’s share of it’s budget to media channels such as print, broadcast and on-line media. The expectations generated by this doctrine is that you create the message one time then broadcast it millions of times. Media buys are made months in advance, and once the campaign is launched there is little attempt to modify or change the campaign. This doctrine leads to a rigid unresponsive campaign infrastructure.
Over the past ten years the infrastructure necessary to execute revenue generation initiatives has played an increasingly larger role. Historically, infrastructure requirements for sales and marketing organizations were nominal – in fact before desktop publishing a drafting board and telephone were all the infrastructure necessary to conduct a campaign. With the advent of desktop publishing, followed by the explosive growth of the Internet, culminating with various CRM, SFA, ERP and other demand chain software technologies an unsuspecting enterprise can be duped into spending tens of millions of dollars on dysfunctional infrastructure. Bottom line to technology and revenue generation is that it does you no good to automate that what doesn’t work to begin with or will need to change with evolving markets.
So the concern I had with the Six Sigma crowd was that they would approach marketing like a manufacturing production line. And attempt to stamp out the creative and instinctive competencies that drive great marketing. But after reviewing the MarketingNPV web site I was impressed by their approach and sensitivity to the needs of the marketeer. Additionally, they have a great set of tools you can down load. Tools for forcasting, decision analysis, modeling etc. You may find their current article – How Six Sigma Should Work for Marketing especially interesting. Click here to visit their site.
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