Bringing Six Sigma to Marketing

As I mentioned in a previous post, Six Sigma Discipline is Good for a Creative Process, accountants are seeing the value in getting Six Sigma and Marketing together. They see the use of the Six Sigma data collection and prioritization methods as a means to create predictable streams of revenue growth. This comes from developing a company’s value proposition and identifying the Critical to Quality (CTQ) associated with it. Let’s take a quick look at the Customer Value viewpoint of an accountant:

1. Customer needs and wants: If you can identify the CTQ's, and determine what the most important CTQ is, you will know how much more important that CTQ is than the next CTQ.
2. Value placed on needs and wants: That enables you to know what impact that CTQ is going to have on your value proposition. That comes from the ability to measure things. Your decision making becomes a lot more focused because it is right in front of you. It is fact?based. It is data?driven.
3. Competitors Products: When you compare and measure yourself against the competition using value and CTQ’s, you will see the Value Gap that exist between your organization and your competition. This is an important function especially for monitoring your marketing. Increasing and decreasing value gaps may be the most efficient, effective and useful way of measuring marketing.
4. Marketplace Perceptions: This perception can only be measured through the value proposition and by the inclusion of real customers through the use of surveys, focus groups and sometimes just picking up the phone and calling a few.

In most successful companies the customer value activity is a premier importance. Determining the customer value proposition for specific product/markets needs to be continuous and understood throughout the organization. As Marketing and Six Sigma come together they have the innate ability to drive revenue growth through the company. Numbers and creativity are not contradictory. They can be highly consistent. If you can identify what the most important CTQ is, how much more important than anything else and then, how you address that CTQ and how you use that CTQ to leverage your value proposition, can then be a creative process. Understanding and controlling these four key points can determine the overall success and profitability of a company. However, you must also understand that customer value is an input to your company and not an output. It is something that has to be measured, monitored and earned! Related Posts: Six Sigma a great companion to marketing Use Intuition or Six Sigma for your Marketing Data? Developing Predictive Measures with Throughput Accounting