Thursday, February 6, 2014

Enlightened Marketing: A Strategic Advantage

Enlightened Marketing: A Strategic Advantage

True enlightenment lies in bringing the same rigor and vigilance exercised over all other business decisions to your Marketing investments, in order to identify and understand the returns.

The key to unlocking these mysteries lies in the rigorous Six Sigma methodology, originally developed to improve manufacturing processes. Applied to Marketing, it allows us to very clearly define what is important and what is not important in the entire process, based on companies’ individual business goals, and help them achieve those goals in a cost-effective manner.

Enlightenment resides at the end of a rainbow, or continuum, that begins with Basic Involvement – simply participating in the Marketing process. From there, the first task critical task is to understand gross spending.

But the real benefits begin when Marketers identify and quantify corporate goals, or “Critical Ys” in Six Sigma parlance, against which they will deliver.

With an understanding of spending and goals, Marketers can then compute the relative Return on Investment for various programs and initiatives. Six Sigma then guides analysis of comparative efficiency – “Z scores.”

Carrying out the analysis, improvement loop brings us one step closer to true enlightenment, which comes when we add in rigorous controls to drive continuous improvement.


The company that follows this methodology as rigorously in Marketing as in manufacturing gains a significant strategic advantage in the marketplace.

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