Jim Novo thought of the concept of Six Sigma marketing but never got around to working on it until he felt that the idea has leaked out into the pseudo-mainstream.
To him, Six Sigma Marketing is a “mindset,” which touches on everything from web metrics to the value of real-time analytics to customer retention to why engineers are trying their hand at
marketing.
Novo further stressed that marketers should not be looking for defects in marketing programs, rather they should be looking for defects in the resulting products of these marketing program “plants” or “lines,” i.e. the customers they create.
Q: In the few years I’ve spent working in the field of Web site analytics I’ve only met a very small handful of companies that are able to take immediate action based on data. Because of this, I’m generally less excited about “real time” data than “getting the right data in a reasonable amount of time”. But people seem to want real-time web analytics, which are of course more expensive. Is there a case to be made for real-time, and how would you go about justifying the additional expense?
A: There is a profit opportunity in virtually every business for real-time analytics, but the opportunity will probably be very different for each business. I think this idea is so important that I’m going to spend a significant amount of time not answering this question specifically, but using a “business model” to explain it. I really want people to think about the following and then relate it to their own businesses.
Engineers know about real-time, they live it. Ever seen the pictures of a NOC (Network Operations Center) for the telcos or the electric utilities? These engineers run the guts of the business in real time, they are sitting there in front of a field of screens that alert them to trouble and they react more or less instantly, or they monitor/correct the action taken by a robot. At a lesser scale, in every company there are IT people that walk around with beepers that go off at all times of the day to alert them to processes and equipment that have gone haywire. It’s real-time monitoring and alerting, it’s here and it’s being done all the time - in engineering and in IT.
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Six Sigma Marketing
