Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

Perreault−McCarthy: Basic

Marketing: A

Global−Managerial

Approach, 14/e

19. Implementing and
    Controlling Marketing
    Plans: Evolution and
    Revolution

Text © The McGraw−Hill

Companies, 2002

554 Chapter 19

Managers who use the TQM approach think of quality improvement as a sort-

ing process—a sorting out of things gone right and things gone wrong. The sorting

process calls for detailed measurements related to a problem. Then managers use a

set of statistical tools to analyze the measurements and identify the problem areas

that are the best candidates for fixing. The statistical details are beyond our focus

here, but it’s useful to get a feel for how managers use the tools.

Let’s consider the case of a restaurant that does well during the evening hours

but wants to improve its lunch business. The restaurant develops a strategy that tar-

gets local businesspeople with an attractive luncheon buffet. The restaurant decides

on a buffet because research shows that target customers want a choice of good

healthy food and are willing to pay reasonable prices for it—as long as they can eat

quickly and get back to work on time.

As the restaurant implements its new strategy, the manager wants a measure of

how things are going. So she encourages customers to fill out comment cards that

ask “How did we do today?” After several months of operation, things seem to be

going reasonably well—although business is not as brisk as it was at first. The

manager reads the comment cards and divides the ones with complaints into cate-

gories—to count up different reasons why customers weren’t satisfied.

Then the manager creates a graph showing a frequency distribution for the dif-

ferent types of complaints. Quality people call this a Pareto chart—a graph that

shows the number of times a problem cause occurs, with problem causes ordered

from most frequent to least frequent. The manager’s Pareto chart, shown in Exhibit

19-2, reveals that customers complain most frequently that they have to wait for a

seat. There were other common complaints—the buffet was not well organized, the

table was not clean, and so on. However, the first complaint is much more com-

mon than the next most frequent.

This type of pattern is typical. The worst problems often occur over and over

again. This focuses the manager’s attention on which implementation problem to

fix first. A rule of quality management is to slay the dragons first—which simply

means start with the biggest problem. After removing that problem, the battle

moves on to the next most frequent problem. If you do this continuously,you solve

a lot of problems—and you don’t just satisfy customers, you delight them.

Number of complaints

(June–September)

Reason for complaint:

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

Had to wait for seats

Buffet table not well organized

Table not clean

Room too drafty

Missing utensil at place setting

Had to wait for coffee

No dietetic sweetener

provided

Exhibit 19-2
Pareto Chart Showing
Frequency of Different
Complaints

Slay the dragons first

Starting with customer
needs

Things gone right and
things gone wrong