5S, the Japanese words: Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, & Shitsuke is one the vital component of Lean Methodology. The beauty of this concept is that this can be implemented in any business domain. Marketing has been an important area which has a huge responsibility of connecting to customers, propagating the value of the company and the products.
SEIRI: SORT
Organizing the strategy or ideas is the first step of any successful marketing campaign. It is very essential to remove unnecessary items that block manpower and time. For an efficient strategy keep it clean and precise – to the point. Say we are selling a Car, then identify those activities that are relevant from customer point of view and focus on selling those. This way it is easy to focus on the selling propositions which may convert the queries into sales.
SEITON: STRAIGHTEN or SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT
Sticking on to deadlines is very necessary for any business strategy to succeed. For a marketing strategy involving diverse customer base and demographics, it is very essential to have systematic plan for the activities to meet the deadlines. For instance the strategy applied by Toyota across different countries is different. In Asian countries potential customers take longer time for deciding a purchase and still Toyota sells larger number of cars in China & India than in Europe. They succeed for their well-ordered activities to understand the customer’s requirements.
SEISO: SHINE
The marketing team must feel very easy to understand and execute the strategy. If the team is unaware of the USP’s of the product or the company then they can never educate the customers in proper way. Shine or keeping it clean is a strategy for companies to follow. They must not mix and match the ideas and concepts of different projects and avoid creating a mess.
SEIKETSU: STANDARDIZE
Learning for different projects must be recorded and deployed in other horizontal projects to avoid similar problems. There must be a practice by the management to identify the customers interaction records and discussed with the team about the good things and bad things that were happened. How to counter similar customers or how to answer similar queries.
SHITSUKE: SUSTAIN
Sustenance is the key to success. The whole process or system of marketing activities must be sustainable. It is necessary to identify the failure modes and eliminate them by thorough brain storming.
Japanese companies like Toyota, Suzuki, Nissan, etc have implemented 5S in every business vertical and their success is evident from the fact that they are growing rapidly day by day. For start ups this methodologies are rather necessary, due to low funds and tight schedules.
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