Why Six Sigma Applied to Marketing is not enough
By Raymond Pettit
The Current Challenge
In the not too distant past, companies relied in large measure on anecdotal evidence, marketer’s experience, and rudimentary tools to develop marketing strategies and tactics, implement them, and assess their effectiveness. It was accepted that marketing cost money – a necessary evil. But recent economic challenges, measurement advancements, and executive expectations have changed all that.
Marketers, and the organizations they work in, are increasingly feeling the pressure to demonstrate accountability. Initial attempts to address the problem have turned to statistical techniques used by economists to quantify marketing spending and return on investment (ROI). The result has been less than spectacular. That is because determining the return on investment of marketing needs more than a statistical technique; in fact, it requires a method that supports the use of a variety of analytic and measurement techniques at appropriate points in the marketing process.
There are a number of ways to do this. For example, a growing proportion of marketers are very interested in using their detailed marketing databases to infer the unique contribution to sales of disparate marketing factors. But relatively few are actually deploying or successfully using the complex, and often expensive, statistical modeling techniques that are being promoted today, due to poor data quality, integration costs and concerns, and spotty, less than relevant results.

But other quantitative marketing measurement, assessment, and planning methods have evolved as well (some with generative bloodlines from the fields of agriculture, psychology, accounting, and manufacturing), and the demand for them is growing. Complex statistical modeling has a role in presenting the big picture of marketing’s impact. But