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Six Sigma Marketing: An Innovative Approach to Achieve Strategic Goals of Sustainable Supply Chain

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Sustainable Supply Chains: Strategies, Issues, and Models

Abstract

With the changing market scenario, contemporary organizations are in dire need of managing their different organizational functions most efficiently and cost-effective way. One such intense customer-focused function is marketing. The intense competition between global and local players has brought many new responsibilities to the marketing function, which includes addressing environmental and climate change issues through marketing functions. The extent of spread of Information Technology has also contributed positive changes to this business scenario as never before. With improved communications, addressing the need of heterogeneous customer base, getting customer insights, etc. became easy for the business establishments. This is where the measurement-based marketing approaches like Six Sigma Marketing (SSM) came into being. SSM is a fact-based data-driven disciplined approach to grow market share by providing targeted product/markets with superior value. The benefit of integrating Six Sigma into marketing process includes better information (management by fact) to make better decisions. It is known that Six Sigma as a process improvement approach has the legacy to bring significant improvement in different business functions. With computer-mediated digital environment, digital marketing is proposing fertile land for Six Sigma implementation to realize its optimum potential and vice versa. In line with the above arguments and constructs, we propose a case study based on SSM applied on a small traveling firm in India to improve its marketing efforts. Following DMAIC (define-measure-analyze-improve-control) approach, we propose how major phases of marketing activity like awareness, consideration, retention, and conversion can be improved through Six Sigma approach. Considering different metrices of digital marketing, this SSM approach explains how sigma level of the marketing efforts can be used to influence customer perception and provide pleasurable experiences. We also provide an illustration to show the usefulness of SSM in sustainable supply chain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Faculty of Science, The Maharajah Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, 390 002, India

    K. Muralidharan & Neha Raval

Authors
  1. K. Muralidharan
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  2. Neha Raval
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Correspondence to K. Muralidharan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Usha Ramanathan

  2. University of Bedfordshire Business School, Luton, UK

    Ramakrishnan Ramanathan

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Muralidharan, K., Raval, N. (2020). Six Sigma Marketing: An Innovative Approach to Achieve Strategic Goals of Sustainable Supply Chain. In: Ramanathan, U., Ramanathan, R. (eds) Sustainable Supply Chains: Strategies, Issues, and Models. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48876-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48876-5_5

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48876-5

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