Today, late in the evening I was watching Jerry Maguire for the third time along with one of my very good friends. Despite of watching the flick a couple of times before, for some reason I couldn’t find it gripping. Today, the situation was different; I got totally engrossed.

As Jerry is mentally reborn at the age of 35, he makes a set of resolutions - Some said and many unsaid. The first one begins by writing a Mission Statement/Memo to all his colleagues with items involving Honesty in Business, Less Clients, Uttermost Care and Maximum Value et al. The dialogue made me wonder on something I have been thinking about for a while now.

Despite of analytic techniques that are being bundled in marketing business these days, marketers are still interested in having a strong pipeline of suspects they want to deal with. Organizations are yet to mature from Quantity to Quality of customers, and should get over with Market share trap.

A few organizations in India had gone aggressively on customer acquisition in the first few years or operation or reorganization. As a result, their books are looking so bad today, a few of the aforesaid organizations have reached a stage where shedding extra weight is imperative as servicing not-so-valuable customers has been increasing the depth of red color on their finance books.

I keep wondering how we can question Pareto in business whenever I get time, for some strange reason 20% of the customers are or would be giving 80% of business is a highly debatable issue. In this regard, I keep building paper-based hypotheses and simultaneously striking them out. Among a few hypotheses, the only one which has surived is “product release and customer acquisition basis Design of Experiment approach”

Businesses today are wanting everything to be scientifically tested before going full-steam. Design of Experiment approach comes handy to these organizations to test their products, learn from the experiment outcomes and strengthen strategies to rollout the product/services to the wide-world.

Marketing Organization should play a vital role in this. Once an product has been conceived,

• Test the product with a set of sample customers
• Analyze the response over a few months
• Segment the sample into fine groups
• Learn as much as you can from the customers, responses and the associated business value
• Deploy strategies on what kind of customers should be acquired for the experiemented product
• Align marketing programmes that ensures acquisition of top 1/2/3 segments of customers from the experiment.

The point to remember is, the aforesaid approach would probably have an adverse impact on market-share statistics. But to me, having a large market-share without substantial business value is meaningless.

The approach I have is a fairly detailed one, not too sure if I will be comfortable presenting it completely on a weblog entry. If you are part of a large organizations that deals with retail customers and find this approach meaningful, please do shoot a mailoff with a brief introduction about you. We can surely engage in a dialogue and plan how to take it forward..