Lean marketing

Back in 1998, whilst working for the now ailing Japanese electronics giant Sony (whose ailing, I should point out, has nothing to do with my having worked there and everything to do with my having left), I applied for a sales position. Asked to make a presentation to my erstwhile colleagues I duly delivered what I considered to be a stirring case for us dramatically increasing television sales that year. This would, I explained, be achieved partly as a result of the football world cup in France, but mainly because of my hitherto-untapped brilliance as a salesman. At the end of my pithy speech the room fell quiet.

"You're a bit of a luvvy, aren't you?" my prospective boss asked, breaking the silence . "You belong in marketing."

This, needless to say, was not the point at which a glittering career in sales began. And frankly, while I'd firmly refute accusations of luvvy-ness (in fact if anyone says it again I'll waltz out of the room in a huff), I remain eternally grateful to my colleague for that. What it was, was the beginning of a debate in my mind about whether marketing is an art or a science.

Being a proponent of the if-you-build-it-they-will-come school of thought (frankly being little short of a wild romantic) I'm predisposed to seeing it as an art. But I'm open-minded enough to accept that many marketing activities far more readily meet the description of a science (they're the bits I'm not very good at) and can understand why some people see the whole of marketing that way. What's more, in a world in which analytics are beginning to replace instinct as the drivers of decision, I suspect I'm part of a shrinking minority.

I mention this for two reasons. The first is the curiously catchy idea - espoused by an eminent IT services marketer with whom I shared dinner recently - that marketing departments might cease to exist over the next 5-10 years. He wasn't suggesting that marketing would cease to exist, more that those who practiced it wouldn't be part of a formal department for much longer. I'm not convinced he's right but it really is a catchy idea. Five years into a period of sustained economic uncertainty, many marketing departments will now be a shadow of their former selves. If that's a matter of financial necessity then it's compounded,  in places like consulting firms, both by the pens-t-shirts-and-umbrellas view of marketing held by senior management, and by marketing departments which often do little to disarm them of that view.

Set within that context, my let's-all-get-together-and-come-up-with-a-lovely-big-idea style of marketing starts to look a bit like a chocolate fireguard. After all, what marketing departments need to do - and do very urgently - is to find a way to demonstrate the return they can deliver on the investment made in them.

That's why I was so interested in a conversation I had recently with Vince Kerr, the former Executive Director of Marketing for Fujitsu and a newly-awarded Fellow of the Marketing Society. In short, Vince is now spending his time talking to companies about how they can apply Lean techniques to marketing, and having quite a bit of success doing so. My initial response, you won't be surprised to hear, was to recoil from such a scurrilous intrusion into the art of marketing, but much as I'd like it to be leaky, it's an idea that undeniably holds water. PDM, QFD and RACI might sound like the sort of acronyms that belong in big greasy operations departments but they're about aligning activity to business objectives, eliminating wasted effort, assessing performance based on delivering what's important to customers and creating a better-optimised organisation. All of which sound as if they might be exactly what's needed to save marketing departments, both from themselves and from the people who have such a dim view of them. And certainly from people like me.