Reengineering marketing strategies and organizational processes

¶ … Engineering Marketing

Business Process Management (BPM) is one of the most effective approaches of aligning processes to objectives, making them more measurable and effective in the process. Applying BPM principles to the most critical marketing processes and re-engineering them takes strong commitment from senior executives to overcome resistance to change (Thomas, 1996) and a clear set of objectives to guide the process redefinition to make them more market-centered (Cafasso, 1996). The intent of this analysis of re-engineering marketing is to focus on the single most critical internal and external process that marketing needs to concentrate on in many organizations to be as effective. As Marketing by nature is oriented towards both internal processes for the fulfillment of projects and the anticipating of and reacting to external factors, one critical process from each area has been chosen for analysis.

Internal Process Orientation and Improvement

The most critical internal process that Marketing relies on is managing conflicting priorities and projects from the many functional departments and business units that require support. Project management process workflows specifically for managing marketing campaigns are often mired in unnecessary and often conflicting process steps, significantly slowing down the completion of complex marketing campaigns. The need for re-engineering this process to first make reasonable schedules for the attainment of milestones, and second, ensuring cross-functional teams move quickly to complete shared action items is critical. Re-engineering the marketing campaign creation and launches processes however require a change in many corporate cultures that embraces measurement and performance over a lack of schedule discipline (Siha, Saad, 2008). Starting with the methodology of how to create a marketing campaign and progressing through the definition of how it is executed, including the selection of outside vendors to assist with key tasks including e-mail list acquisition, this process in many organization needs to have value stream mapping applied to it to see where there are opportunities for performance improvement (Siha, Saad, 2008).

External Process Orientation and Improvement

The most critical process that marketing has is the generating of sales leads by working with a wide variety of sources outside their company. Re-engineering this process has taken on added urgency given the economic uncertainly in many nations of the world today. There are companies today using Six Sigma methodologies to understand how they can be more effective in capturing, escalating and closing on leads. The challenge from a re-engineering standpoint is that ownership of the lead management and escalation process is often shared (Thomas, 1996). In redefining this process, it is critical for single points of accountabil8ity by each step in the process be mapped, assigned and measured. The critical link in this process is measurement over time and improvement in performance based on accountability and clarity of roles. Re-engineering lead management is as much about changing a company's culture as it is about changing a process itself. For lasting change to this process to occur after re-engineering is complete, senior executives must champion change and illustrate through their actions that they stand committed to the change they are requesting their employees to make.