The Potential Value of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Application to Marketing

Based on a book/text I’ve read.

Recently I was sitting through an interactive workshop on “Personal Leadership” when the presenter provided a simple but crucial insight regarding interactions between two people with a pre-established relationship.  The fundamental concept is that in every interaction between those two people each member involved has three (3) options regarding how this interaction can affect the future of the relationship: you can improve it, maintain it, or degrade it¹.

In reading the basic concepts associated with Lean in ensuring that an organization properly captures the true voice of the customer (VOC) and translates that in to fundamental engineering requirements in order to reduce muda (waste) in the process, there is a technique for optimizing the collection of that data known as the Kano model.  This theory claims that products can evoke certain reactions from a consumer placing those products in to one of three (3) categories: dissatisfiers, satisfiers, or delighters².

I believe that these two concepts provide paralleling structures from which one can more effectively target their marketing efforts when going after particular consumers.  Marketers are consistently trying to learn the true desires of their target audience and predicting how these priorities are going to shift or change over time.  In order to do this successfully, a marketer must be in tune with the audience knowing what questions to ask so as to draw the right information.  These frameworks provide examples of potential techniques to allow one to affectively reverse engineer the customer’s wants.

One objective of marketing is to alter the customer’s perception of some aspect of a product so as to create a perceived point of differentiation.  This in turn justifies a higher price-point thereby providing greater margins for the parent organization.  When one is operating at a parity cost structure there becomes a reliance on brands to place value (whether real or perceived) on their products to generate revenue.

I have highlighted these three intertwined and related issues in business which each stem from entirely different functional areas in order to demonstrate the connectivity that exists throughout many of the fundamental topics in B-school.  This may be a motivator in driving you to pursue a greater knowledge base between functional areas to round yourself more as a business leader or this may drive you back to your particular area of concentration, shying away from management and operations entirely. 

Jon Wilson

¹Moss and Williams. (2010). Personal Leadership, Wake Forest University Schools of Business. 
²Pande, P.S. (2000). The Six Sigma Way, McGraw-Hill, New York.