Six Sigma & The Online Marketing Agency

December 7, 2008 |

I RECEIVED A Google Alert today regarding ‘Six Sigma Marketing’ which has not happened since I set up the alert over a year ago… Marketing and six sigma are fair weather friends at best and was always a hard sell - something that seems to have remained true since I left the six sigma world two years ago.

I’d like extend my congratulation to Tocquigny who won the award for the ‘Best Achievement of Organizational Business Improvement by a Small Organization’ at WCBF’s 3rd Annual Global Lean, Six Sigma & Business Improvement Summit. To date I have only come across a few references of Six Sigma principles being applied to online marketing. Avinash & the Eisenberg’s have both written about applying six sigma principles to web analytics and online marketing so even though the chatter for this topic is minimal it comes from a few very influential voices.

After reading through the case study about how Tocquigny helped Regent University increase their lead generation through paid search and other tactics, I am not sure how much of a true six sigma project this really was. Tocquigny uses a three phased ‘Measured Approach’ - Discovery, Formulation & Deployment to help their clients - and it’s clear that they made significant improvements for Regent University by using this method. Six Sigma is traditionally a five phased approach - Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve & Control - that helps reduce cost and eliminate defects. At best I’d probably call the Measured Approach something more like ’six sigma lite’. Six sigma in its earlier form was a four phased - ‘Define’ was apparently the last phase to be added - so is possible Tocquigny has refined the six sigma process for online marketing? Have they removed the phases that do not add value? If so I’d be interested to learn more.

Regardless of whether you call it Six Sigma or a Measured Approach with five phases or three phases I think the more important message is that a process and data driven approach does work to produce results. Tocquigny has proven that much and more by winning this award - and again my congratulations for that. Avinash & the Eisnberg’s have said as much in their books & blogs so why are there not more instances of this happening in this industry? Maybe there are. Maybe it’s not called Six Sigma.

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