How Six Sigma Can Help Improve Marketing

Marketing is a process. Six Sigma is an approach for achieving process excellence. It will help you improve the marketing process by providing tools & techniques for identifying what the marketing process is, including suppliers, inputs, process steps, outputs, and customers.

Six Sigma helps you understand the need to determine who owns the process and helps the process owner determine how to improve it. It provides a framework for improving all aspects of this process. It does much more as well.

The converse is also true, marketing can help Six Sigma. Both marketing and Six Sigma focus on customers.

Marketing is a management discipline dedicated to understanding customer demands, how to design products meet them, and how to let potential customers know what's available. In Six Sigma training for Black Belts and Green Belts, students typically learn a number of tools that are borrowed directly from marketing, such as the analytic hierarchical process, quality function deployment and Pugh matrices. Master Blacks use conjoint analysis, a quasi-designed experiment approach to measuring customer importance weights. Design for Six Sigma is all about integrating the design process across marketing, engineering, and production to better meet implicit and explicit customer demands.

Beyond the technical tools, when Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma is well done it begins with understanding what customers are solving for, then helping them achieve their goals by improving the processes you use to provide them with service. This is truly an integration of marketing and Six Sigma.

In the end, all organizations are solving for the same thing, stakeholder goals. Marketing's primary focus is on the demands of the customer stakeholder. Six Sigma's focus is on the processes that create and deliver products to meet these demands. The synergy between Six Sigma and Marketing is inescapable.

Thomas Pyzdek is the author of numerous books, including The Six Sigma Handbook. He has worked with large and small organizations around the world for over 40 years in industries as diverse as health care, call centers and high tech manufacturing. Pyzdek offers Six Sigma Training and Certification in live, online, and blended formats. Pyzdek, and his team of expert associates can help you meet your organization's quality and process improvement goals. Support includes consulting, training, and coaching for your entire team, from executives to the change agents working in the trenches.