Knock down the wall between lean management and marketing!

Written par

GdeGConsulting

in

Sell

Lean management, inspired by the Japanese, has expanded first in production. Toyota is the best-known reference, with the Toyota Production System. Lean management is based on three principles: delivering customer value, eliminating waste, and continuously improving performance. The starting point of the approach is the Japanese term “gemba”, which translates as “the place where things happen”. By agreeing on the material reality of an observed situation, either at the customer’s site or in the factory, the teams themselves define an action plan. The “customer gemba” is a core concept in lean manegement. The teams involved in a lean project start to go out into the field to observe the customer’s reality.

Marketing’s mission is to match the company’s product and service offering with customer needs. Marketing today puts at the heart of its priorities the key term “customer experience,” which describes the customer interactions with the company’s products and services, starting with the purchase process, usage, and ending with the product end of life. Marketing teams have a considerable range of resources and methods at their disposal to describe and quantify the actual customer experience: market research, in-store observations, analysis of internet buying behaviour etc. By studying the perceived value for the customer, they can design and then promote value propositions.

The state of collaboration today

The profiles, activities and priorities of lean management and marketing champions are very different:

Lean practitioners are members of the quality, production, or operations departments. Engineers or technicians by training, they are enthusiastic about the potential transformative power of lean management. They pride themselves on their mastery of methodologies and tools. They spend a lot of time working in manufacturing plants and moderate numerous internal participative workshops during which they implement methodologies selected at central level. They know the grass-root reality of the company, and they pay a lot of attention to operational performance indicators (cost of non-quality, delivery performance, etc.) in order to work on the root causes of problems. They feel helpless when it comes to studying the “customer gemba” outside the company.

Marketing practitioners report to the general management or to the sales management. They are graduates in business management, or engineers or sales people who have been promoted. Marketing managers have an anticipatory and strategic vision of the market’s evolution, or a mastery of digital tools and data, or creativity to design new offers, develop communication campaigns and sales tools. Their budget allows them to explore customer habits, but with the transfer of marketing investments to digital, and the extension of their responsibilities to a wider geographical area, their ability to directly observe reality has been diminishing for decades. They are not involved in operational performance, nor in customer complaints.

When collaboration occurs, it is mainly triggered by the need to obtain or maintain ISO 9001 certification, within a constrained timeframe, and is limited to the minimum. Lean practitioners often have a poor understanding of the reality of the sales and marketing functions. They can take marketing’s positions as authoritative, which spares them the heavy lifting of going out to see the customer’s reality for themselves: “marketing has said …”.

Different languages for a same reality

There are two worlds, so split that to signify a given reality, each uses different terms:

Why is it necessary to knock down the wall?

The added value of the company involves almost every function in the company, apart from support functions such as finance and human resources. Lean management and marketing champions are involved in the process of designing, positioning, communicating and delivering this added value.

The customer has a holistic appreciation of the experience provided by a supplier. Reinforcing quality at every stage, and getting the business teams that contribute to it, is becoming a growing requirement in a world where information is exchanged quickly, and expectations change rapidly.

Marketing needs the lean approach: Lean management can bring a lot to the management of marketing and sales processes, which are based on increasingly automated CRM, ERP, e-commerce, pricing, and customer service systems.

Lean needs marketing to guide it in choosing the customer reality to be studied within a vast and diversified universe of customers and markets: which customers are the most important for the company? The most demanding? The ones who are the most advanced in terms of what the market will be like tomorrow? Marketing has the resources and methods of recruitment, sampling, questioning and market observation that are invaluable to operational staff who want to observe the world of the customer.

If nothing changes, the best source of generating ideas for progress and innovation dries up, and the teams go round in circles on their usual paradigms. The need for progress no longer comes from the base of the pyramid, but from above, and late, with all the risks of disempowerment, demotivation, and loss of meaning that this implies. The best transformation of the company is the one that is wanted by the base.

What to do?

For the marketing manager

• Learn about the lean approach. A few days are enough!
• Constantly ask yourself how well you know the customer’s reality.
• Go and observe the customer’s reality yourself, to be surprised and inspired. Write and disseminate your report on the observation, with pictures and videos.
• If possible, ask the lean manager to join, so that you can look at from a different angle and discern some structural elements in details that you think are insignificant.
• Focus innovation proposals on changes in the real world, and on what is structuring for operational excellence.
• Beware of disruptive innovations that do not bring about an improvement in the customer’s reality. Conversely, be aware that process improvements can be converted into, unglamorous, yet highly attractive value propositions for the customer.
• Before starting to measure customer satisfaction, collect all the data that exists in the company on the subject, particularly at the operational and quality levels.
• Be open to spend time with an operational team that asks you about the customer’s needs.

For the lean manager

• Get your head out of the toolbox!
• Make sure to gain an overview of the whole value chain, even if you are only involved in a limited part.
• Beware of synthetic information and general marketing guidelines. They may be disconnected from local reality or rapid changes in a client’s situation.
• As soon as possible, from the start of a lean project, check out the robustness of the knowledge of the customer’s reality.
• Do not shortcut the customer observation sequence for reasons of project timing.
• Ask marketing to contribute to the methodologies of customer selection, recruitment, questioning and observation. Marketing can have access to valuable customer data.
• Dare to propose the launch of a lean approach within the sales marketing functions.

For the general management

• Be the first to go into the field and immerse yourself in the client’s reality, and make this known. Highlight the listening and observation approach, illustrate it with significant anecdotes, without prejudging that what has been observed applies elsewhere.
• Ensure that all the teams at the heart of the value chain can get insights into the customer’s reality, whether local or global.
• Be cognisant of the permanence of silos: relentlessly encourage cross-functionality, especially during the project team building phase.
• Question both the lean and marketing managers on their knowledge of customer realities, and hold them jointly responsible.