Do we need a Marketing System?
Actually this post would be better titled: "We have a marketing system...but do we actually understand how to optimise it?"
Uber blogger (and good friend) Johnnie Moore has discovered John Seddon's seminal work on management..."I want you to cheat".
This book is a brilliant accessible introduction to systems thinking and the utter failure of procedural thinking.
I've written about these issues elsewhere, but re-reading it after 10 years, it begs the question...why haven't we learned these lessons?
Do organisations understand marketing as a system? Do they even understand it as set of linked, value-creating processes? Do they understand how it can be standardised through the value-chain to increase end-stakehodler value? Do they understand its collaborative dependencies?
Do we actually understand our profession from a management standpoint?
Just as Seddon now evangelises lean manufacturing...so the next stepwise challenge for our industry is to create 'lean marketing'...optimising value-creating processes for each consumer-producer.
What does Six Sigma marketing actually look like... to the 'customer'?
Editor
Comments
Love systems tink(er)ing but one of the points of lean marketing is THE major shift from doing stuff to customers to doing stuff WITH them.
Playing the old MIT Beer Game ( Senge - Fifth Discipline ) teaches you (hopefully) that the system is only complicated 'cos you dont ask the customer what they do/did/want. The system is impossible to optimise without the customer
I spent a couple of days with some real smart telco people talking about segmentation and service. Its easy to forget that segmentation is only needed to approximate what people want. Why bother when we now have the ability to ask them what they want and track what they do?
Thoughts?
Posted by: Peter Massey | January 21, 2006 2:06 PM
Ah...feedback loops!
Too much marketing still sees the customer as a an end consumer of value - not a collaborator in its creation...!
Posted by: Editor | January 22, 2006 9:59 PM