If you are a successful company, why would you need marketing? What makes you a complete success in your customer’s eyes? If you did all this, would you need marketing? Some examples:
- Sales Price = Always sell at a price customers are willing to pay.
- Diversity = Make only what customers need.
- Quality = Make products that will satisfy your customers, always!
- Delivery = Deliver products at the exact time a customer needs them.
- Cost = Produce at the lowest possible cost and less than item 1.
If you are doing this, your marketing budget may be able to be virtually eliminated. Your marketing, if needed would be customer-centric in a fact finding mode that would give you constant feedback. This would enable you to keep improving or developing new products in your pipeline. Of course, in a mistake free organization your improved/new products would be ready the day the customer needed them.
Henry Ford said: “If you would have asked the customer, he would have just wanted a faster horse!” As a company we cannot totally rely on our customer feedback. Many times, they will not have the capacity to know the latest technology and trends effecting the products or services that they use. What they do know is their business needs and requirements. So concentrating on where his business is going is an important function of marketing.
But can we have mistake-free marketing? I think there is 2-ways to discuss mistake-free 
marketing: The strategic side and the tactical side. The strategic side would be your marketing messages and the tactical side, producing these messages. I am going to spend time on the strategic side deciding on how to facilitate that interaction with the customer. I will also discuss the tactical side, how to implement a mistake-free marketing system. The tool I will use to achieve this is defined by the Lean term, Poka-Yoke. Poka-Yoke emphasizes the detection and correction of mistakes. It puts special attention on the one constant threat to any process: human error. Careful attention is also placed on every activity in your process and instantaneous feedback tools are utilized as the key to successful implementation.
I would enjoy hearing marketing blunders, mistakes that you have thought about during this reading, do you have any?