Muda in marketing: How to turn waste into value.

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Taggart: “There’s been a muda”

Sidekick: “Oh no! Where?”

Taggart: “At a brand’s marketing department. Wasted marketing opportunity has been discovered.”

Sidekick: “Oh is that all? I thought someone had died!”

Taggart: “Well the brand might if the wastage isn’t addressed.”

For those of you old enough to remember the eponymous detective drama, we’re obviously not talking murder, no we’re talking Muda, a Japanese word meaning futility; uselessness; wastefulness, and a key concept in Lean Six Sigma thinking. It refers to the inefficiencies within a business that impact value.

Originally Muda referred to seven types of wastage which were identified by Taiichi Ohno, the Chief Engineer at Toyota back in the 60s. They include:

1.   Transportation

2.   Motion

3.   Inventory

4.   Waiting

5.   Overproduction

6.   Overprocessing

7.      Defects

In the 1990s another form of waste was added to the list, that of unutilised talent.

Here at The Thread Team, we hate waste. Detest it. One of our driving principles is the abolition of wasted talent, wasted opportunity and wasted investment. We question out-moded ways of working in order to tackle the scourge that is wastage in marketing.

So using the eight wastes of Lean Six Sigma, here’s how they can be applied and minimised in marketing:

Transportation: Waste in transportation includes movement of people. As the pandemic has shown us excessive movement is unnecessary, and whilst there will be a gradual return to the workplace, many people are already asking to change the way they work to incorporate the flexibility that #wfh has allowed. This is something we recognised way before the onslaught of Covid, as one of the first remote marketing consultancies that doesn’t have a physical office.

Motion: Motion can be confused with transportation as it too includes the unnecessary movement of people, however it is more about the process of the motion. For instance having a laborious digital filing system which results in team members having to click more times than is necessary. You’d be amazed at the amount of time wasted by poor logic trees and indeed the added risk of repetitive strain!

Inventory: Many people do not view inventory as waste, particularly as in accountancy inventory is recorded as an asset. But having more inventory than necessary can lead to problems. In marketing this form of waste can be applied to data. How many organisations collect data for the sake of it? A study by DMA USA revealed that 85 percent of CMOs admitted that their organisation had a hoarding mentally. Not really understanding why they were collecting the data in the first place and actually never getting around to using much of it. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should! In fact, sometimes having large volumes of data can impede analytics, making it more costly and harder to identify the necessary insights.

Waiting: The wastage associated with waiting includes waiting for things to happen. In marketing all too often you are reliant on other people. That’s why we try and breakdown silos and form teams that bring together departments that traditionally do not work together. This creates agility and significantly reduces the time it takes to devise and activate a campaign. Recently for a client where speed to market is critical, we created cross-functional squads bringing together team members from BI, Data Science, Product, Delivery, Creative Studio, Global Marketing, CRM Tech Solutions and the Marketing Team. Working collaboratively in this way meant we reduced the time frame from months to weeks.

Overproduction: In marketing overproduction hands down refers to the number of unnecessary reports that are produced that no one reads. When we asked why a weekly report was necessary and the answer? “Because that’s the way it’s always been done.”

Over-processing: Over processing is doing more work, adding more components, or having more steps in a product or service than what is required. This is very common in marketing. Why use one word when you can use two? Marketers are also hard wired to make themselves look busy. It’s a functional thing. However, better project scoping and planning results in less over production which again leads to reduced campaign execution time and lower cost.

Unutilised talent: This one is pretty self-explanatory. And again is very much at the heart of our founding principles. Before we set up The Thread Team we were constantly amazed at the amount of talent that needlessly walked out of the agency door due to the rigid agency structure – people that moved more than a do-able commute away, people that left of start a family, people that wanted to increase the life side of their work life balance. By going remote we’ve stopped that talent from being squandered. We bring together expert marketers, no matter where they are based or their stage of life meaning that we offer our clients a bespoke team of experts that truly suit their needs.

And finally:

Defects: We take a slightly different view to defects than Mr. Ohno. Whilst undeniably defects in manufacturing are wasteful – in marketing they can in fact be beneficial and support the importance of continuous experimentation. We are constantly analysing in real time the impact of our campaigns; tweaking them here and redeploying investment there.  XYZ didn’t work so we’ll try YXZ next. Defects, or poorer than expected results make us question our approach and  provide new knowledge, which can be used to refine and tweak ideas, which in turn make them better. So embrace the defects!

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