How do successful marketers differentiate themselves from their competitors? They do not necessarily have better research, products or services. Irrespective of industry, this boils down to a single principle: successful marketers market their brands, products and services with more consistency and continuity than others. Examples include Nestle, Apple, Toyota and Starbucks -illustrating that successful marketing is not the domain of particular industries.

Pressures on today's marketers are intense. How can marketers engage jaded customers in revitalised ways while managing the costs of channel proliferation (MySpace, Facebook, Net2.0, etc)? How do they deal with increased scrutiny over marketing spends? Some marketers are beginning to embrace the principles of ‘lean manufacturing', pioneered by Toyota. The Toyota production system evolved as a means to reduce waste and eliminate unnecessary production steps. Today the concept of ‘lean systems' is defined as elimination of waste and non-value adding steps, and respect for people. Respect for people can be further articulated as follows: "Respect means you hold people accountable to the system, following it and improving it (‘kaizen', or continuous improvement). Lean leadership is about enabling and empowering people; helping them to grow professionally, allowing them to achieve goals and take pride in their work." A growing number of leading marketers realise that they will never have enough resources, money or time to address all the unmet demands placed on them. Lean marketing is a set of empirically derived techniques designed to respond to these constraints and characterised by:

1. Repeatable processes
2. Defined procedures, with business rules
3. ‘Pull scheduling', with defined service levels
4. Short cycle times
5. Low rates of rework, with major reductions in defects 
6. Technology enablement
7. Clear accountabilities for quality for all process stakeholders
8. Measurement of performance, outcomes
9. Empowered, multi-skilled people
10. Culture of continuous improvement

Our approach to reviewing your marketing processes is collaborative and targeted. We focus on:

• People: establishing clear accountabilities (RACI), levels of change management required, bringing together operational islands
  staff.
• Process: introducing measurable time, cost, and quality improvements in terms of faster cycle times, reduced rework through re-use, and improved response rates amongst others.
• Technology: supporting best practice processes with our knowledge of leading tools and technologies.

The Customer Experience Company is a business & technology consultancy with extensive experience working on complex organisational projects and programs. Our consultants have experience working on marketing initiatives with a view to improving both efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing process and outputs, including customer experience. We are not like many consultants in the industry. We are pragmatic and have hands-on experience in bringing large complex projects to fruition having worked in large businesses in line executive and operational roles) and have built businesses ourselves