Marketing fails when it does not deliver the right message at the right time to the right person! Doing this prevents waste, minimizes cost and more importantly excites customers. Typical marketing practices are unable to do this when you think of marketing in a linear fashion. If you develop your marketing as a cycle in lieu of the typical Marketing funnel you will begin to understand how this can be accomplished.
Lean marketing systems are developed from the pull of the customer. If you review my blog post on Lean Marketing, The Toyota Way you will see how Toyota look at marketing as a cycle and as the “Radar” for Toyota. The radar meaning: Voice of the customer. This constant feedback shortens their marketing cycle by creating an intimate knowledge of the customer so that they can be at the right place at the right time and delivering that knowledge to the right person.
How does someone create and utilize a marketing cycle in the planning process. The typical Toyota solution is to gradually move on a solution as data becomes available. Very much like the iterative process in an Agile Project Management Project. In marketing, you must have a cadence much like the military established in your marketing practice. Think of the army, everything that can be is standardized: uniforms, weapons, training manuals, vehicles and so on. The reason why is so they can react to the huge variation presented itself in a combat mission.
You should note that we are not writing about a repeatable process. Repeatability means doing the same thing in the same way to produce the same results. Though repeatable will allow you to convert your inputs to outputs with little variation, it also implies that no new information can be generated and used. Repeatable processes are not effective because precise results are rarely predictable in the marketing process. Reliable processes focus on outputs, not inputs. Using a reliable process you can consistently achieve a given goal even though the inputs vary dramatically. Reliability is results driven.
Marketing cycles are not completely stable. They are subject to variation caused by new knowledge. They are constantly being improved, the emphasis of activities changes during projects from more emphasis on understanding the customer at the beginning to more constructing and testing marketing functions at the end. We are trying to eliminate variation caused by new knowledge. A marketing process that does exactly the same thing every time is useless but we are trying to eliminate variation that we cause for no good reason.
Cycles are small and fast so that they will continuously produce knowledge. The knowledge is used to determine trade-off and is the primary exchanges at schedule meetings. These changes will be introduced into the marketing process quickly so that customer’s knowledge value can be evaluated through small incremental changes.
Conventional thinking produces large quantities of knowledge, for an example a direct mail piece. They schedule and make these mailings to large volumes of consumers for efficiency and cost reduction purposes. Conventional thinkers imagine marketers will have all the needed knowledge before they start designing. Lean marketing recognizes the cost of such a large batch and the waste that must be transported, stored, managed and delivered to the customer. Utilizing a marketing cycle process, small batches with several different messages would be sent out, tested for effectiveness and improved upon as the data is obtained. The cost of using small batches is completely negated by the improved results.
Referenced Books:
Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products (2nd Edition)
Lean Product and Process Development
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