Six Sigma Marketing: From Cutting Costs to Growing Market Share

By R. Eric Reidenbach

Published by ASQ Press in 2009

Six Sigma Marketing challenges the way both the Six Sigma community and the marketing area think about business and the way they currently do business. It does so by providing a detailed and structured approach—one that is entirely data driven—to unleash the power of Six Sigma on the crucial need for revenue growth. Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) is a fact-based, data-driven disciplined approach to growing market share by providing targeted product/markets with superior value. It is organized around the following elements:

• Customer value is the driving strategic metric. It replaces the emphasis on customer satisfaction embraced by both Six Sigma and marketing, and provides a much stronger link to market-share gains and revenue increases.
• SSM has a unique set of powerful tools designed around the idea of customer value to concentrate the organization’s efforts on both acquisition of new customers and retention of current customers.
• It uses a modified DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) model that is not only very familiar to the Six Sigma community but also friendly to and easily understood by marketers.
• It strives to make marketing a more effective and efficient factor within the organization.
• Its goal is defect reduction. A defect is defined as failure to provide satisfactory customer events. Customers interact with an organization in many ways: sales, billing inquiries, service, repairs, parts, and so forth. Each event, or interaction, has the ability to increase or decrease their loyalty and hence the organization’s market share.
• SSM expands the traditional view of marketing to include emphases not only on pricing, product, promotion, and distribution, but also on processes.