Delivering to the Marketing Accountability Mandate

Marketing is by now a well-established discipline. With its institution comes the expectation that companies, firms, small startups, and even authors or speakers will devote a portion of their time, energy, and personnel to its diktats, namely: attracting and keeping the customer. Applying the ideals of total quality management (TQM), however, many companies transformed operations from messy processes with incompletely formulated ideals into neatly streamlined powerhouse manufacturing systems. Many boardrooms are already knee-deep in efforts to apply the quality movement to marketing. The first is statistical quality control (SQC), a process that uses specific, measurable traits to assess the quality of a product. A better way to do that is statistical process control (SPC). While SQC monitors the quality of outputs, SPC monitors inputs, according to the American Society for Quality. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, craftsmen trained in the apprenticeship model still provided their own quality control in an effort to keep business by providing excellent products.