Over in the UK I moved from introducing lean in operational environments to work in marketing to learn why every time we leaned a process the marketing teams kept developing products that didn’t conform. The reality I found was that most marketeers didn’t understand that customers place different values of the benefits they get from the features of a product or service i.e. they don’t understand the value chain of the end customer. Consequently they don’t major communication on the parts of the product/service that create the most value, hence your comments about engine size v mpg. This is even more damming as the marketeers fail to understand the value placed on their products/servcies so fail to understand how elastic their prices may be and believe me it is often upward, having encouraged a company to double its prices to consumers in four years and seeing twice as many customers come on board, surely a contradiction you would think! Then the marketeers don’t employ techniques to reduce waste in the operationalisation of their marketing plan i.e. direct marketing techniques are often ignored. So in the UK direct mail campaigns (often referred to as junk mail) offering credit cards will run with response rates of >0.5% using lean techniques I have managed to achieve a 200% improvement on this. This has been my direction for the last two years and I am convinced that at the junctions of lean thinking, six sigma, systems thinking and market research lies the answers on how companies can develop products with the right features/ benefits, at the right price with redundant features removed and benefits maximised. These can the be pass onto operational enviroments designed to produce them to the expectation of the customers with minimal waste.

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I received a fancier piece just recently – this time from Texas (my guess is a national send this time).

It would not be tough to send the same junk and provide several contact dealers. And if one dealer thought they “owned” you it wouldn’t be tough to say that if one dealer has a relationship (you bought stuff from them…) and other dealers do not that the first can block other marketing. Of course this wouldn’t be necessary if it was really one system being optimized but since the current situation is competing dealers trying to optimize their results rather than focusing on Toyota overall and the customer then we get what is pretty much seen by everybody: manufacturing improvement going incredibly well – other things like dealers are not that different from any other company that doesn’t have a systems thinking focus.

Toyota is doing great stuff but they still have so much more to do better. Which might make you happy if you are Ford… but maybe you should worry more instead because Toyota is far from running out of problems. We all know would make Ohno very unhappy if Toyota could not see problems to fix were to happen. And also it means you can’t aim at catching up to where Toyota is today. By the time you do they will have improved many of the problems they have today.

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