The Mud Valley™ brand marketing community was originally set up, in 2000, as a coalition between strategic marketers and web developers to share best practice in brand marketing strategy.
Our fundamental belief was, and is, that knowledge needs to be embedded in processes and tools in order to be replicable.
So that is what we do - we develop processes and tools based on the issues that we, and others, confront in the course of our working lives.
Today, these processes and tools are used and adapted by major corporations and agencies/consultancies around the world.
When you see them, they are not pretty. They are templates, built typically in Excel workbooks, designed to complete a specific task. The reason they are not "prettied-up" is that they must be capable of being easily modified by anyone who wants to use them. It is important to have working tools to complete a task effectively, but working practices and terminologies differ from organisation to organisation, and our tools are there to enable you in your strategic tasks, not to present you with technical barriers.
The critical thing is that they do the job. We use them ourselves all the time. They have proven to be effective, efficient and economic. What could you develop yourself for £9.99?
Five years on, we have evolved. We are now leaders of international businesses, heads of product/system development, heads of international strategy and planning, senior project managers and Six Sigma belts (including a Master Black Belt).
We still believe fervently in brand marketing (without customers in a market, you do not have much of a business), but the knowledge, processes and tools we have needed to develop more recently have expanded beyond classical brand marketing.
Accordingly, we are broadening Mud Valley's offer to include business portfolio planning and Six Sigma for marketing, in particular. We hope that you will find this of value.
Business portfolio planning is about having scarce resources and seemingly unlimited opportunities. Where do you invest for the best rate of return on your resources? We have some sophisticated, yet practical tools in this area which we use on a daily basis.
As you probably know, Six Sigma is a quality process with its roots in production, as have most quality processes.
Applying it to brand marketing is problematic for three main reasons:
- cycle times - in weeks/months/years for brand marketing, in minutes/hours/days for production
- uncertainty of outcomes - arbitrary/negotiated targets for brand marketing, precise specifications for products
- confounding factors - brand marketing operates in a social environment, production in a manufacturing environment
All of which is to say that Six Sigma for marketing is a very different beast than Six Sigma for production, and most Six Sigma specialists do not understand this because they are primarily engineers, not brand marketers.
We are in the process of adapting Six Sigma tools specifically for marketing applications.
We hope that you will join us on our journey.
