Use Intuition or Six Sigma for your Marketing Data?

There is more data than you really know what to do with and that’s a major concern, collecting unnecessary data is wasteful and harmful. It just adds a lot of noise. You need a template to follow. You have to look at meaningful data as your customer sees it. One of the reasons I am a proponent of using Six Sigma in Sales and Marketing is that importance of having meaningful data. Six Sigma provides a proven set of tools that will give marketers an opportunity to work on the need versus creating the tools.

I’ve been through a few marketing meetings and few of them are about what the numbers tell them. It’s a process based on intuition and if you ask, how did you get from here to here? Well let’s say you are not invited back. Looking at situations and relying on your intuition may mean to a large extent you’re simply guessing and in many cases it’s not an educated guess. Follow the facts. The facts will lead you to where you need to go.

It reminds of a story when I was going through green belt training. They would show us different scenarios of a story on the overhead and had us pick what we thought the outcome was. We would organize and input the data into mini tab. When we analyzed the data, the answers were practically counter intuitive. I do not remember anyone that guessed the right answer.

How do you remedy the situation? You remedy it by bringing information, numbers, facts, into the decision making process and you base your answer, your solution on what that data, what that information, what those numbers tell you. This makes for a much more informed decision. One that has got accountability to it because if something’s wrong, if an outcome is not what we want it to be we will have the capacity to go back and see where we may have made a mistake, correct that mistake and then go forward again. But if you’re just operating on intuition what do you go back to?

The use of data in Six Sigma provides a disciplined, fact based data driven approach, you measure things. Marketing on the other hand, does not measure to the extent that they should. That is why we say that a lot of marketing is intuition based or it is agenda based, but it is not data driven. That’s what Six Sigma Marketing would provide. For example, measuring how loyal your customer base is.

When you can put a number on something like that, than you can begin to manage it. That old saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I have never run across something more true in my whole life than that idea. If marketing remains intuition based, it will prove very difficult to manage.

Just think if you never did any marketing that you could not put a number too. Can you imagine the power that you create? You decision making becomes a lot more focused. It is fact based. It is data driven. And when someone says, “We should be doing this,” you simply say, “Show me the numbers.”

All this comes from the ability to measure things!

This blog post is an excerpt from a conversation that I had with Eric Reidenbach in our discussion about the 5 Cs of Driving Market Share.

Audio Post: Role of Managing Data in Marketing