Six Sigma and Marketing

Keith Pincher, founder of Tsana Associates - a consulting firm specialising in continuous improvement and innovation methodologies - says "Marketers may consider themselves to be the creative artists in the company, but in the boardroom they must begin speaking the language of statistics and data that is widely understood and accepted."

Pincher explains that it is not that marketers ignore data, it is that it often that they collect too many of the wrong kind and interpret them without wisdom. Marketing must focus on its processes, its decision making, particularly in relation to marketing campaigns, price realisation, channel selection and management, product and customer portfolios and new offerings. These areas require analysis and decisive decision making based on good data well used.

All strategies and company processes - marketing, supply chain, operations etc. - are aligned to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and are improved and designed backwards starting with what the end user requires. Marketers don't need Six Sigma practitioners to tell them that, after all, they invented the concept. But somewhere along the way the initiative has been taken away. Marketing must now apply the statistical techniques being used so successfully elsewhere in their organisations and get their own house in order

The good news is that it appears that this new breed of marketer is emerging. A marketer that wants to restore the balance within marketing and gain credibility amongst its peer disciplines.

Generally inadequate marketing metrics such as volume changes, sales trends or even net revenue are used to indicate marketing performance; often metrics contrived by frustrated financial managers finding it difficult to measure this thing called marketing. Marketing must show unequivocally its value to the bottom line, none of the aforementioned measures do that. The best criterion for measurement is to maximise net profit, after deducting the cost of marketing, and balancing it with non-financial market based metrics.

Pincher explains that Six Sigma, popularised by Jack Welsh and successfully used by countless international firms, offers both process improvement and continuous innovation methodologies that have successfully been applied to sales and marketing. Six Sigma, originally a quality improvement methodology developed by Motorola, is one of the global best practices used by Tsana Associates to produce sustained marketing performance improvement.