By Yvonne Tocquigny CEO, Tocquigny

The Quest for Quality: Applying Six Sigma Principles to Marketing

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Define Measure Analyze Improve Control The New Marketing Organization

The Quest for Quality: Applying Six Sigma Principles to Marketing

Yvonne Tocquigny CEO, Tocquigny Yvonne Tocquigny is founder and CEO of Tocquigny, a unique blend of consultancy and marketing firm. Tocquigny specializes in providing measurable integrated marketing solutions that drive proven results. Over the past 25 years, Yvonne has grown the firm into a nationally recognized agency that specializes in delivering measurable marketing, as well as developing proprietary tools to deliver metrics to clients. She can be contacted at yvonnet@tocquigny.com
Six Sigma principles prescribe an organizationwide set of processes, standards and motivations to improve performance, create efficiencies, decrease defects and reduce variability. While these principles are traditionally associated with industrial environments, their application need not be limited to that realm. This paper will specifically explore the potential for applying Six Sigma principles to create efficiencies in marketing. This is critical at a time when marketing is likely to perform poorly in large organizations, to wield little influence within them, and to be held in relatively low regard among their leadership. Less than 50 percent of Fortune 1000 companies even have chief marketing officers (CMOs). And in organizations where there are chief marketing officers 32 percent cited their relationship with the chief executive officer (CEO) as the one that most needed to improve, according to survey results published in the September 2005 issue of cmomagazine.com. By applying a Six Sigma approach, marketing has the opportunity to lay a solid foundation for improving what has, by any measure, been astoundingly poor performance. It is not unusual today to see marketing investments that produces a negative return on investments (ROI), or have a success rate that is close to zero. According to the June 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, citing data from Copernicus Marketing Consulting: 84 percent of programs are second-rate, leading to a decline in brand equity and market share 4 percent is as good as it gets for advertising ROI 74 percent is the less-than-stellar figure for customer satisfaction Other measures are consistent with these findings. The Marketing Measurement Association, for example, reports only a $58 return on every $100 invested in marketing. The Marketing Science Institute reports that a 100 percent increase in marketing expenditures yields just a 1 percent increase in sales. And Nielsen reports a 95 percent new product failure rate. Measurement of performance is one of the five fundamental phases of Six Sigma methodology. And once a company begins to measure marketing performance, it may find, as the preceding statistics suggest, that the results data indicate a negligible return or even a negative return on the marketing investment. This information can be so surprising and disturbing in an environment of rigorous inspection and control that the marketing group may be tempted to sweep this bad news under the carpet and stop measuring altogether. Increasingly, marketing departments are finding that if they do not take steps to measure their results and create greater efficiencies, the finance group will be more than willing to do it for themand may very likely respond by cutting the marketing budget. This should come as no surprise, given that finance is the area that has access to a great deal of spending-related data, is focused on tracking and cutting costs, and is constantly working to discover where resources could be better deployed. From the perspective of the marketing department, it would be far preferable to seize the opportunity to set and execute on an agenda for improvement and thereby restore its tarnished reputation within the organization. As Tocquigny Chief Marketing Officer (CFO) Pedro Laboy puts it in the white paper Why Marketing Has Lost Its Clout and What It Can Do to Get It Back, it is time for marketing to step up to the plate and prove its value to the larger organization. With that in mind, let us look at the current problematic state of, and potentially brighter

future for, marketingwithin the context of the five phases of Six Sigma methodology: Define goals and deliverables Measure current performance Analyze the reasons for defects Improve the process to eliminate defects Control performance

Define
Todays marketing organization faces the challenge of defining its role within the larger organization in an entirely new way. Only by doing so may it begin to provide the scope of disciplined processes that will ensure consistent, reliable data is available for evaluation in the quest for improved efficiency and performance. This redefinition of marketing within the organization comprises two important shifts in the positioning of marketing: the shift from functioning as a discrete component to working as an integral part of the organization, and the shift from playing a tactical role to taking on one of increasingly strategic importance.

From Discrete Component to Integral Role

Marketing has traditionally been perceived as a discrete function within the corporation, but its role is really far more encompassing than that. When you consider that brand perception encompasses everything a customer knows about a brand, then it follows that everything that touches that customer is, essentially, marketing. While that may make it a challenge to define exactly what marketing is, this much is certain: There is a growing agreement among C-level executives that marketing should create predictable streams of revenue growth. As part of the enterprise-wide effort to increase customer value and reallocate capital to its most effective use, marketers must set new goals for quantifiable success and find new ways to achieve them. In this new environment of accountability, they must prove marketing operations represent a value center rather than a cost center.

There is the rub: Marketing groups have traditionally operated independently within the larger organization, according to their own ad hoc styles; asking them to form closer, more integrated relationships with other departments and groups is bound to meet with resistance. But there is no escaping the fact that to be successful, marketing departments will have to become allies with finance. It is the only way they will be able to get the quantifiable data they need to prove their worth. This new need for cross-functional collaboration and deeper knowledge is a new challenge for the CMO. Finance is not the only function blending with marketing. Sales, customer service and even traditionally inwardfacing departments such as product development and operations are finding the lines between their responsibilities and marketing increasingly indistinct. It is no longer possible to define the marketing function using the clear boundaries of the past. Metrics must now be clearly tied to business goals, and the use of metrics must be standardized across the organization, with the primary goal being to provide insight and drive decisions, not to justify marketing programs.

be more than willing to do it for them.

The Marketing Finance Connection and Beyond. With the CMO under increased pressure to demonstrate the validity of marketing expenditures, the marketing function is inching closer and closer to the one area from which, ironically, it has traditionally maintained perhaps the most distance: finance. Historically, marketing organizations have had rather adversarial relationships with finance teams, who have cut budgets and held the purse strings. However, finance is the one department within a corporation most likely to have the data that marketing needs to demonstrate the validity of its efforts and expenditures. It is ultimately the definition of this data and the standardization of data across organizations that will quantify the value of the marketing organizations of the future. And high-quality data will only be obtained through an aligned vision and collaboration with other company functions.

Marketing departments

are finding that if they dont take steps to measure their results and create greater efficiencies, the finance group will

The Groundwork for Six Sigma. Companies that hope to apply Six Sigma principles to marketing must first overcome an array of structural barriers:

department of three (all trained to do little more than produce spec sheets and trade show materials) should be able to achieve. The marketing function tends to be siloed into multiple groupswhether according to region, product line or other differentiator that operate independently of each other. Each works as an individual power unit with its own set of defined goals, processes and standards, and each measures different things in different ways, making it virtually impossible to get consistent data or implement enterprise-wide controls. There is no mechanism in place with which to communicate marketings goals to the company at large or to seek its alignment with and support for achieving them. The first order of business, then, is to begin to shift marketings role from that of a discrete component in the organization to a widely integrated function. This will require overcoming existing preconceptions about the role of marketing, as well as replacing the

organization to a widely integrated function.

The first order of

business is to begin to shift marketings role from that of a discrete component in the

Many marketing departments that have been performing a simple marketing communications role are at a loss as to how they can fill the broader, more strategic marketing role that is required to meet the goal of quantifiable achievement. They are staffed with employees trained to create tactical selling tools, which points to the disconnect between the traditional marketing skills of the past and those that are needed to fulfill results-oriented expectations. Even when marketings role within the organization remains limited to providing materials to support sales or customer services, the larger organization may have unrealistic expectations of what marketing ought to be able to accomplish within that role and with existing available resources. Figure 1, below, shows one companys wildly ambitious vision of what its marketing

Defining the Role of Marketing: Matching Expectations to Resources

One of the challenges for any marketing group attempting to redefine its role in the larger organization is the disjuncture between what may be expected of it and its ability to meet those expectations. Here is what one company surveyed said it expected of its three-person marketing team: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 gather customer/market segmentation intelligence understand the voice of the customer and voice of the business maintain expertise in regulatory issues, industry certifications, etc. develop pricing strategies help negotiate pricing with customers attend sales meetings develop state-of-the-art tools to effectively sell all products work with customers to report on customer satisfaction work with customers to determine product requirements communicate customer product requirements to engineering create a process for sharing information develop and implement efficient, easy-to-use marketing processes

The moral? High expectations of what marketing should achieve must be accompanied by a commitment to the resources, skills and training required to fulfill those expectations.

Figure 1

siloed mentality with expectations of integrated operations, and implementing mechanisms to connect marketing and its goals with the rest of the organization. Only by doing so may marketing begin to realize a strategic role of measurable value within the organization.

From Tactical to Strategic Importance

Many people today still think of marketing as research, communications and sales support. This is not the type of marketing department that will fulfill the expectations of a Six Sigma organization. The function of marketing within organizations must expand beyond traditional, tactical roles. If marketing is only responsible for communicating the value of a product to customers, it is not operating at full potential and it will fail in producing the process improvements that Six Sigma seeks.

process improvements that Six Sigma seeks.

To expand marketings role, analytical and process-oriented skill sets must be available to marketing staff. That may mean restructuring

Too many times, it is engineers who define the best product they believe they can offer to the customer based upon what they are capable of creatingand who then determine the product cost based upon what they think it would cost to manufacture it. Marketing is left trying to create value for the customer and justify the

Sample Existing Marketing Structure

Create marketing communication tools to assist sales force with direct and indirect sales.

Sample Optimal Marketing Structure

Provide marketing research Understand product features, functionality and customer values well enough to guide new product development Conduct competitive analysis, pricing analysis, cost analysis Determine market elasticity, plot product price vs. quality by region and by segment Provide business case and value analysis models (What are the benefits to our customers in using our products?) Help develop value propositions, understand the Voice of Customer and assist in pricing strategy for products Create marketing communication tools to assist sales force with direct and indirect sales

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 2 shows the existing competencies of a sample Six Sigma organizations marketing department, while Figure 3 shows the expectations that the rest of that organization had of the same marketing department. This obvious lack of alignment, coupled with the absence of skill sets to fulfill expectations, must inevitably lead to a painful failure of the marketing organization. It is important to see this as a failure to organize the right people in the right roles.

Settingand SupportingExpectations. Before positive performance improvement can be achieved by marketing, both the expectations to be placed on marketing and the methods of measuring the fulfillment of those expectations must be defined. Only then can the marketing organization meet the needs of the company and be viewed as adding value. For instance, rather than producing marketing materials that communicate what the product team dictates, the marketing function must grow into an organization that understands what the customer values most, then help determine what price that customer is willing to pay. Marketers must ask how much it would cost to deliver that value. And finally, they must help determine what the final product or innovation to be delivered to the customer shall be.

to embrace functions such as business intelligence, research, customer satisfaction, database modeling and data analytics in the marketing organization. The increasing availability of Six Sigma marketing training will also help to provide marketing with the skills to successfully shift its role to increase its strategic importance within the organization.

If marketing is only

responsible for communicating the value of a product to customers, it is not operating at full potential and it will fail in producing the

cost. Great marketing begins with creating value for which the customer will be willing to pay. This gathering of Voice of Customer is one of the highest uses of the marketing function, because it will lead to more relevant allocation of resources. Yet few marketing groups are trained or prepared to handle this task.

Which services will be outsourced and which will be handled in-house? How does the data from one group dovetail with the others? What are the processes for evaluating that data and turning it into actionable intelligence? These are all hard questions to answer for the typical marketer. A close alliance with the IT and finance groups will be crucial.

The Brand Value Formula

Brand value = Customer value = Shareholder value

Marketings value rests on its ability to create value for the organization. In this quest, it is important to remember that brands and customers, not products and services, generate long-term shareholder value. This is why it is so important for marketing to acquire the mindset and skillset to go beyond playing a products/services sales support role.

Developingand documentingdata and decision-making processes. Marketing executives must develop and support a major IT competency in their organizations in order to share information and integrate intelligence across different groups. They must be able to demonstrate proof of performance in marketing. In order to do this, they must have the ability to report on closed loop processes. They need standardized data so different products and functions within the organization look at the same information in the same way. Marketing departments must gain an understanding of what the rest of the corporation expects of them, and especially what the CEO needs, in order to help set overall expectations so that if they are met, the corporation will see positive business growth and success. Any disparity between desired functional capability and the ability to deliver can be addressed by redefining the marketing organization to have fewer boundaries, developing a collaborative culture that embraces other functions in a defined way, and adding the skill sets and technology tools needed to perform the tasks expected. A clear understanding of and alignment on the processes that the marketing function will follow must be in place. The processes by which marketing will share information and collaborate with other groups must be clearly defined. Once the marketing function has defined how it can best serve the corporation, and once it has gained the strategic role and capability to perform at that level, it is ready to develop and document the processes for handling data and making decisions. How will data be managed? How will data be shared so that collaboration and efficiency are enhanced? What are the tools needed for doing this?

Measure
Marketing needs the right data to show that it is generating a measurable revenue stream. As part of the process of identifying which data should be measured and how it will be measured, the CMO must, as described in the preceding section of this paper, seek alignment both across the marketing groups and with the other corporate functions. All of this constitutes, to put it mildly, an enormous task. But ultimately, it amounts to figuring out what to measure, measuring it accordingly across the enterprise and getting accurate results.

The Key Question: What to Measure?

In its effort to begin measuring and improving performance, marketing faces the challenge of defining which data exists, where it resides, which data is needed, and how or if the data can be obtained. Across organizations, the quality and consistency of data usually varies. This can make it difficult to assemble a baseline of past spending and performance across the enterprise, because spending and performance have likely been measured differently, if at all. Marketers can begin to address this by identifying appropriate metrics that relate to meeting goals for: revenue growth and gross margins customer lifetime value (CLV), profitability and cost brand awareness and perceived brand quality customer satisfaction relative purchase frequency acquisition rate and conversion rate Redefining the metrics. Traditional marketers have an abundance of metrics already. The

problem is that most of these are measures that relate to what the marketing effort amounted to in cost or effort rather than actual results. When collected data is a ratio of cost and effort to results, you have a greater degree of intelligence. The issue should not be what was paid for the marketing efforts themselves, but how those efforts contributed to achieving the overall company goals and to generating new revenue. ROI used to be the measurement every manager wanted. However, this can be a relatively shortsighted way to view marketing progress, and other more enlightening views are emerging. In measuring ROI, a marketing program is given a time window that defines the start and finish of the effort. Measurement takes place in this window, and this is what is reported as ROI for the program. Usually, program results are reviewed quarterly. This practice of program ROI measurement misses opportunities. For instance, if the goal of the marketing program is to acquire customers, then the acquisition of a customer has a greater overall value than the amount of that customers first transaction, even though we may not see the payoff for acquiring a customer for some time. Short-term metrics versus long-term metrics. By focusing on measuring the lifetime value of a customer instead of the revenue gained from that customers first purchase, marketing will get a better idea of the true return on the marketing effort that gained the customer. CLV metrics make it possible to determine the maximum a company should be willing to pay for a customer, enabling marketing to gauge its related costs in a more accurate and forward-looking manner. Another example of a long-term metric for marketing to report is the defection rate of customers. Given that a 5 percent increase in customer retention can add as much as a 25 percent increase to the bottom line, gauging defection is well worthwhile. Marketers must develop processes to measure it and define its cause. To borrow from Six Sigma terminology, what is the defect in the customer experience that results in defection? It is important

because a significant loss of customers can make a marketing campaign that gains new customers irrelevant. Long-term metrics represent a shift from transactional marketing to relationship marketingin which the value of the customer relationship is a more valuable metric than the knowledge of a single transaction. This is a more complex metric to determine. There is a valuable role for Six Sigma processes to play in controlling the quality of the analysis. It is that quality of analysis that will determine the degree of real intelligence gained and ultimately affect the quality of the decisions made to execute continuous improvement in marketing.

If marketing is to be measured, there must be past data against which to compare current and future activity. Given that there is frequently not sufficient or reliably accurate data on past activities and past results within marketing organizations, creating a benchmark can be difficult. The task of creating truly accurate and reliable data is exponentially more costly than creating approximate data. Therefore, unless there is a great deal of discipline in the data recovery process, a Six Sigma-driven marketing team may begin with less-than-accurate data and thus produce measurements of dubious quality. In some very large global organizations in which the marketing organizations are siloed, there are few accurate and consistent records of exactly what the enterprise has spent on marketing. There is also no common understanding of exactly what defines a marketing expenditure for a group. Getting around these obstacles starts with asking some tough questions: Where do marketing costs stop and sales costs begin? Is the internal dissemination of product knowledge to engineers, sales people and management considered the role of marketing or IT, or both? Whose budgets should bear the load of the new, more subtle forms of marketing that bleed across an organization, or the costs of research

than the knowledge of a single transaction.

The Importanceand the Difficulty of the Benchmark

Long-term metrics

represent a shift from transactional marketing to relationship marketing in which the value of the customer relationship is a more valuable metric

to understand the Voice of Customer (research that will ultimately benefit research & development, marketing and sales)? If data is also segregated into purchase information, billing information, customer service data and other function-driven buckets, there may be nomenclature issues to be addressed so that definitions of what is being measured can be made consistent and useful to all.

across the organization; and developed methods to share the measurement data, he or she will have a good start towards developing the fodder for analysis that is needed to begin to improve processes.

targeting. This is a Zero Sigma practice.

Analyze
Simply measuring performance will not improve it. Increased marketing effectiveness comes from the generation of insight that leads to actionable intelligence. Having insight into what works and what doesnt work can mean that expensive mistakes are not repeated and painful lessons are not relearned.

Unfortunately, many

marketers, even within Six Sigma organizations, are still using their instincts to guide major decisions such as those relating to positioning and

Get at the benchmark basics. The most basic requirements for setting a benchmark and enhancing the overall ability to measure are: a database of past marketing and purchase activity, which will facilitate the calculation of CLV data that provides the ability to segment customers and prospects according to customer needs and purchase patterns key drivers of brand equity, the value of current brand equity and the value of relationship equity (this data can be gained through research and calculations) benchmark against competitors These are all things that can be known. They may not be easy to attain, given the tough questions outlined in the preceding section, but it canand mustbe done. Live by the integrity of the data. Excellent marketing demands excellent product positioning and customer targeting. One of the dangers lurking in marketing organizations today is the marketers gut knowledge of what is true for the customer, who the targets are, what they will respond to and so forth. Unfortunately, many marketers, even within Six Sigma organizations, are still using their instincts to guide major decisions such as those relating to positioning and targeting. This is a Zero Sigma practice. When a marketing group knows who its best potential customers are, what they respond to and what types of media opportunities are the most efficient to reach them, without current measurement through research processes, that is a problem that must be addressed. After the marketer has defined what will be measured to show progress towards a common goal; cleansed the existing data so that there is a uniform, true picture of past performance; created consistent measurement processes

Toward Quantifiable Insights and Understanding

A profound understanding of the customer and the customers needs will lead to new business-building ideas that improve the ability to achieve company goals. Gaining such understanding requires aligning the goals of the enterprise organization-wide. To reiterate the lessons of preceding sections of this paper, companies can no longer afford for research to operate apart from marketing, or for branding to operate its own independent silo. Intelligence and data must be easily available for everyone to access. Having a solid process in place along with the tools to evaluate results will make this achievable. Then insights will no longer be merely hunches. Careful analysis of marketing performance, inspired by Six Sigma processes, allows the company to address many difficult, but necessary, questions: Which customers purchased before and have not purchased again? Why? Which continue to buy, and why? At what point are leads lost? When do they fail to progress to the next sales level and why? What are the true lost opportunity costs incurred as a result of less effective marketing efforts? Where are the defects in the marketing processes that result in lost sales, wrong prospects targeted and customers treated inappropriately?

 Where does variability occur in qualification criteria for prospects, follow-up, pricing, contract negotiation and service? How do we distinguish between productive and non-productive activities? The difference between true analytics and the simple reporting of results is the ability to identify and answer crucial questions whose answers will lead to insight, process changes and increased success. Learning from past performance. Often, the greatest insights come from observing poor performance, then making efforts to improve that performance over time. These lessons are an expensive form of education. In one sense, they become an asset belonging to the corporation. However, each insight and lesson comes with a price. The key is to learn the lesson once and share the insight so that the corporation doesnt have to continue to pay for each individual or group to learn it over and over. This approach of learning the lesson once makes the argument for a corporate memory bank, if you willa record of best practices and brand history, in the form of a marketing knowledge databasethat is easily shared throughout the organization to provide a shared institutional history of lessons learned. If, instead, the intelligence gained through analysis is scattered across the corporation, and hidden in the memories of current and former employees, it will inevitably be lost and have to be regained at great cost. As new staff is added they should be able to access existing historical analysis through the marketing knowledge database and build upon that information, rather than learn old lessons again. Leveraging collaboration. The process for analyzing marketing performance within global organizations must be collaborative in order to ensure objectivity and accuracy, as well as to realize the full benefit of the data collected. The conversations that arise when marketing, sales, product development, finance and IT gather to analyze data are infinitely more productive for the organization than if only marketing was to assess it. Each function can help the others to be more successful in this collaborative arrangement.

Formal cross-functional processes and agreements addressing how and when data will be analyzed are critical to the timely assessment and response to data. When data is processed into dashboards, groups can view tests to help identify the extent of improvement needed in each function to achieve the target results. More insightful cause-and-effect scenarios can be developed, risk analysis can benefit all teams and statistical inferences can enlighten beyond just the topic at hand.

Improve
The main benefit of measuring marketing programs and processes is the ability to garner actionable intelligence which can be used to optimize, or improve, performance and processes. As data is analyzed and insights are generated, possibilities for improvement are presented for many areas. Aside from improvements in the implementation of marketing programs, there can always be improvements in tools, technology, processes and skills.

Change is Good
An agile marketing organization will embrace opportunities for improvement, even when they are disruptive to individual work groups (as they almost always will be) and even though they may be more expensive than business as usual. As analytic insights challenge marketings original Plan A, the staff members who are flexible, open to new ways of approaching problems and eager to try the next idea will quickly rise to the top as the most valuable. To realize true improvements in marketing process, as new ideas are implemented, testing should be utilized to gauge their value, along with modeling of different scenarios. When approached methodically, marketing tactics can be vastly improved on many fronts. Following are a few simple examples of how performance can be measured and marketing efforts improved. Customer perceptions (Voice of Customer) regarding brand, product benefits, pricing, customer satisfaction and a number or other qualities can be measured through survey or focus group research. If you understand current

performance and processes.

The main benefit of

measuring marketing programs and processes is the ability to garner actionable intelligence which can be used to optimize, or improve,

perceptions, and you also know what you would like future perceptions to be, that makes it much easier to achieve improvement. Messaging can be improved to make the marketing program more relevant or persuasive, or delivery mechanisms can be improved for more frequent or noticeable exposure to the messaging. (If, for example, surveys show that your target does not respond to email, the program can be improved by simply finding ways other than email to communicate with the target.)

Targeting efficiency should be studied to understand which potential targets will make the best customers. How many of these customers are there? What are they willing to pay for your product or service? How easy is it to sell to them? Drastic improvements in marketing results can be seen through increases in targeting efficiency. These are just a few of many methods available for improving marketing performance. Keep in mind that it may be necessary to iterate through the MeasureAnalyze-Improve steps until the optimal level of performance is achieved.

and improved upon, rather than reinvented.

Controls should be

implemented so that best practices are followed

Efficiency can be measured by tracking the number of responses to a marketing program within a given period of time. For instance, if a direct mail program is implemented to promote a product by driving the recipient to a Website for the purchase, it is quite easy to measure the percentage of recipients who went to the Website, and whether or not they purchased once they were there. The higher the ratio of purchasers to recipients, the more efficient the program is in getting the desired response. To improve such a program, the marketer might try a number of tactics to increase the purchase percentage, such as: offer development: communicating an incentive to the targets to help motivate them to respond target refinement: altering the list of prospects so that those targeted are more likely to respond in the desired way message refinement: creating a more relevant, compelling message for the target Customer Lifetime Value can be measured to determine the maximum a marketer should be willing to spend to acquire a new customer. Once this is known, improvements in budget allocations can be made to increase marketing efficiency. Perhaps more funding should be allocated to meet marketing goals, for example. Knowing the CLV will help determine where the cut-off point should be for marketing spending to achieve desired results. Or, if marketing spending is already high in relation to what is known about the CLV, improvements will have to come from changes in some other aspect of the program.

Control
When improvements are achieved, it is important to recognize and codify the best practices that led to them. Best practices should be made available via the marketing knowledge database or other appropriate method to everyone in the organization. Controls should be implemented so that best practices are followed and improved upon, rather than reinvented. When improvements to best practices are attempted, they should be documented and analyzed formally to understand why the improvement either did or did not work out. The goal is to continue to improve upon best practices so that performance gets better over time.

The Necessityand Challenge of Control

Marketing departments often have a difficult time maintaining a high level of control over marketing activities and the best practices associated with itto a great extent because there is no one person with this responsibility in the organization. Neither the CMO nor traditional roles such as traffic manager or marketing director can possibly monitor and control all best practices down to the level of individual staff in each marketing group. Global corporations find it difficult enough just to control the use of the brand attributes, with

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marketers in different silos frequently giving in to the temptation to tweak them to better suit their needs. But as brands become diluted through lack of standards control, the overall success of marketing execution will suffer. Assigning responsibility and imposing discipline. To ensure control over standards and practices, new roles in global marketing organizations must be developed. These roles must address the responsibility of ensuring that the knowledge gained through process improvement is utilized and that true efficiencies are garnered until a real improvement is achieved. This runs counter to the cultures of many marketing organizations in which people have joined the field because they want to utilize their innate creativity. But the key is to channel that creativity to areas where it will be productive, and to place clearly defined limits on which parts of marketing programs are open for new interpretations. Another aspect of assigning responsibility and imposing discipline is the need to establish processes and to make sure people adhere to them. Formal training that imbues everyone in the organization with appropriate skills and fosters in them a solid understanding of the importance of the companys accepted processes falls under the category of control. This goes back to the concept of enterprisewide alignment. The entire team must have a true understanding and appreciation of what the marketing department is trying to accomplish and how its processes support that goal. Training on the importance of data, how to understand data and why the organization should trust the numbers is also important for anyone whose role includes marketingwhich, as noted earlier, is practically everyone in the organization whose role touches the customer in any way. Control as a function of risk reduction. The control function of a marketing department can create objectivity in the way marketing dollars are spent, reducing the companys financial risk. When programs are analyzed and assessed for their effectiveness, the CMO will

be able to make much better decisions in support of marketings overall goals. A disciplined control of spending that allocates funds towards the most strategically important efforts, and that carefully manages vendors and outside costs, can create significant savings for any company. The role of control within a marketing organization should also include the implementation of preventative activities. Risks inherent in marketing activities should be evaluated on an ongoing basis, and scenarios should be developed to address how the corporation will deal with them, should they occur. This helps the organization understand what parts of a process should be subject to increased control in order to minimize risk and also to create a timelier response in the event of a crisis. The addition of control will present the greatest cultural shift for most marketing organizations. For some, it will change many aspects of the work process, and some people will not find this pleasant. However, without controls in place it makes no sense to follow Six Sigma processes through the other areas of marketing. As a company shifts towards operating with Six Sigma principles in place, the control function is one that can be outsourced if needed to usher marketing into new ways of defining and improving what it does, for the good of the entire enterprise.

yield a measurable value to the company.

The New Marketing Organization

The marketing organization of the future will be one that can prove that its activities yield a measurable value to the company. Toward this end, marketing organizations must reinvent themselves to become more aligned with overall company goals and more data-driven in the pursuit of real improvement. The five principles of Six Sigma methodologyDefine, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Controlserve as an extremely useful context for marketings efforts in this regard.

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The marketing

organization of the future will be one that can prove that its activities

Tocquigny is the union of agency and measurement consultancy. Through brand stewardship, results marketing, insights, analytics and ideation, Tocquigny provides global enterprises with integrated solutions that are fully measurable and improve business performance. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Tocquigny is one of the nations top 50 B2B agencies (B-to-B Magazine) and top 20 interactive agencies (ADWEEK).

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