I read yesterday Seth Godin’s excellent post on the case for process in marketing. According to him, in many cases, process is underrated. “Process is your ace in the hole when your intuition stops working. Process is the system that doubles a plant's efficiency when you've done everything you can think of. If process makes you nervous, it's probably because it threatens your reliance on intuition.”

Process is considered a bad word in the Marketing world; it supposedly stifles creativity and the “art” in Marketing. I do believe on the contrary that the best process work takes work and complexity out of the system, allowing marketers to focus on the creative and strategic aspects of the job.

The wave of efficiency improvements and marketing budget cuts of the last few years have addressed the most obvious and less complex sources of improvements from brand advertising cuts, agency consolidation, market research budget cuts and headcount reduction. With ROI becoming increasingly more crucial to the marketing function, marketers have to do more with less and consider automation opportunities that were not available to them a few years ago.

Doing this requires Marketing to “industrialize” its core processes and follow a trend that has already happened in manufacturing, supply chain or research & development. The deployment of Six Sigma techniques with their phase-gate processes and problem solving approach (DMAIC – Define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is starting to take hold in Marketing. The widespread adoption of these principles is essential to designing lean and efficient marketing workflows that reduce variability, improve time to market and take work out of the system. I recently put my entire team through the HP Six Sigma “green belt” training and we are actively pursuing process improvement opportunities.

At the same time, we have to be conscious of the limitations of process work. Process re-design is more applicable to highly repeatable processes such as marketing budget allocation, market research or collateral development than it is to brand advertising. Six Sigma techniques need to also be implemented by marketers (not quality black belts) to take into account differences between traditional Six Sigma operations environments and marketing processes.

Process should not be a bad word in Marketing and should be embraced by marketers. There is no question that more discipline and rigor is required in the current Marketing environment. This will allow Marketing to reallocate resources to the activities that truly contribute to business growth.