Lean marketing

Periodically I mention "Dangerous" Debbie Jenkins. What Debbie has promoted over the last few years is that the kind of behaviour that has driven enormous process improvements in Lean Manufacturing can be used in a marketing environment to reduce costs and improve sales revenues.

As a starting point she suggests that you should classify all your marketing activities in a simple taxonomy:

• is it mandatory in your segment or country of operation?
• does it save money or show a positive ROI in terms of increased sales?
• miscellany bucket

If something falls into the first two buckets then it should be continued. She believes, probably quite rightly, that most marketing activities will fall in the 3rd bucket and she has a series of tools which helps the business assess whether the activities in the 3rd bucket should be continued or killed.

Having culled the contents of the 3rd bucket, many Marketing Managers might be left with time on their hands. Debbie also has a series of powerful tools which you can use to bring on new marketing activities which will align with your sales efforts so that they should help to bring in more business.

It's a powerful series of ideas and while her style might not appeal to everyone, there is plenty of meat there which can be used across a wide range of environments. You can access her site at Debbie Jenkins. She has a book - Gorillas want Bananas - which covers a great many of her ideas and she used to have an online course which could be downloaded although it looks as though it may have been discontinued. You can access some of her tools through the Lean Marketing website.

Tags

• Marketing