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Taguchi
Doesn't Work for Marketing
by Mario Fantoni. President, TaguchiNow, Inc.
The Taguchi Method doesn't work for
marketing. Actually, it doesn't work if it is used as it was created by Dr. Genichi Taguchi. It needs to be radically modified in order to optimize
marketing campaigns. How do we know? Because in more than a
170 Taguchi-based
marketing optimization projects - and nobody can claim to have our track record - we verified this over and over again.
Here are the facts:
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From June of 2003 to
December of 2007, my company, TaguchiNow, Inc.,
performed 170
optimizations for 54 clients.
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In the first three optimizations we used the pure Taguchi Method, as it was developed
by Dr. Taguchi for the manufacturing industry, and we achieved increases of response rate of 1%, 6% and -5% (that is right,
a decrease of 5%)
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After these three learning
projects, we made an important
discovery that we used in all
optimizations following the
first three. We used a modified
version of the Taguchi Method
achieving an average response
rate 30-50% higher than the response rate of a control piece
tested simultaneously with the optimized
one.
Of course, the success of the Taguchi
Method applied to the manufacturing industry has been verified thousands of times. Innumerable cars, television sets and many types of hard products have been designed and optimized with the Taguchi approach. Why then didn't anybody, including Dr. Taguchi himself, apply the Taguchi approach to
marketing from 1946 until 2004, the year we claimed that we had found a way to dramatically increase advertising response using Taguchi
testing? Because Taguchi experts didn't have the marketing knowledge to do it. It is as simple as that. To make Taguchi work for
marketing it takes the mind of both an engineer and a marketer. And the luck to discover the secret that we found
back in 2004.
So here is the bottom line: don't use the standard Taguchi
Method for
marketing. It doesn't work. If someone claims it does, they are wrong.
If you want to know more about the secret that makes Taguchi work for
marketing, contact us.
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