How to gear up for just-in-time marketing

In practice, JIT marketing means that companies spend only what’s needed, when it’s needed, introducing a customized message or offer to target consumers in ways that can quickly close a sale. It does away with the expensive “inventories” of surplus effort that mass marketing creates, replacing advertising clutter and promotional waste with effective messages attuned to the needs of interested people exactly when they are in the buying mood. JIT marketing targets distinctive customer segments whose interests span many product categories. It then enlists cross-functional teams of “creatives”—programmers, data scientists and quality assurance specialists—who work together to cut costs and improve the effectiveness of marketing investments.

But shifting your marketing organization to this “lean thinking” mindset isn’t easy, as companies learned a few decades back when Toyota introduced the concept of JIT manufacturing. While many Western companies attempted to replicate Toyota’s success with lean manufacturing, only a few did so effectively. The problem? Most focused on the most visible elements of JIT without understanding its underlying philosophy.

The same thing could happen with JIT marketing, which is why marketing leaders should keep the following ideas in mind.

1. Focus on pull, not reach. While traditional marketers usually achieve the levels of reach they need to communicate with target customers, the broad methods they use often waste time, effort and money as they try, but fail, to engage millions of disinterested consumers. While the brand-building capabilities of broadcast advertising cannot be ignored, the rising levels of clutter (that is, “inventory”) that it causes in the marketplace dilute its sales effectiveness.
   
   JIT marketing organizations, on the other hand, recognize that “targeted pull” really matters. For example, to zero in on customers already inclined to buy, Delta Air Lines has created a special Facebook app that makes planning and booking group travel easier. The app enables group members to invite others to travel, share trip details and improve their decision-making processes.
   
   To make these kinds of innovations happen on a routine basis, JIT marketing organizations need the agility that only cross-functional teams offer as they craft the messages and experiences that will lure the target consumers to the brand. Doing so makes it unnecessary to broadcast to a wider audience, an effort marketers should reserve strictly for brand-building efforts.



2. Know when to engage—and where. JIT marketing organizations recognize that in today’s digital world, broadcast media represent just one of many options for communicating with customers. That’s why they seek and engage customers wherever relevant opportunities occur. Instead of relying on superficial metrics like the number of Facebook “likes” or online click-through rates, which are often poor substitutes for actively engaging customers, they constantly invent new ways to influence their target audiences.
   
   

   One example of this kind of engagement is Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads, a social network for avid readers. The acquisition gives Amazon, the world’s largest bookseller, a knowledgeable, disinterested source of recommendations that it can integrate with its powerful personalized recommendation algorithms to provide shoppers with a customized list of books they could be legitimately interested in buying.

3. Invest in “interactions,” not campaigns. Traditional marketing departments usually focus on the macro-level results of their advertising and promotional campaigns (for example, reach, sales conversions or focus group reactions) without considering all of the attendant waste. In contrast, a JIT marketing organization recognizes that marketing succeeds at a much more up-close and personal distance—one that involves individual customer interactions. Gilt, an online shopping portal with millions of members, has gone to considerable lengths to personalize its marketing messages. The company’s website enables members to highlight their favorite brands and then sends personalized notifications whenever those brands go on sale. Each day, in an integral part of the company’s marketing strategy, Gilt sends more than 2,500 versions of these personalized emails to users. A successful interaction strategy requires companies to achieve total quality across their marketing, sales and service functions. To invest every interaction with the quality it needs, JIT marketers focus their spending priorities on improving today’s customer experience, and recognizing its outsized impact on sales, loyalty and word-of-mouth recommendations.

4. Unite and align marketing activities. Many firms structure their marketing departments around discrete core activities with different objectives: advertising generates reach, promotion converts sales, and research underpins the design of long-term marketing campaigns. Compare that to a typical JIT marketing organization, where all of these activities are inseparable. Cross-functional teams continually calibrate both the extent of advertising reach and the content of promotional messaging based on real-time insights, aligning them to improve quality and head off wasteful spending.
   
   

A leading drugstore chain wanted to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of its promotions by offering its marketers easier and more timely access to detailed market insights. The information enabled staffers to fine-tune promotions, drive greater sales within existing customer segments and even create useful new micro-segments. This data-sharing plan encouraged experimentation, and teams could rapidly adjust promotions to get the most out of every marketing dollar they spent. In addition to boosting sales, the program ultimately delivered significant marketing efficiency gains.

5. Make continuous improvements automatic. All companies want to deliver the right message or offer to the right customer at the right moment through the right channel. But JIT marketing organizations do more than aspire to this mindset—they use data, analytics and multi-channel customer experience to refine their understanding of customer preferences continually and automatically. Hertz, the global car rental company, tirelessly updates its understanding of customer behavior and uses this information across multiple channels in ways that convince consumers to choose personalized offerings, which often carry higher prices. The organization has honed the analytics capabilities behind this process, enabling it to tap into the customer’s willingness to take specific offers, and understand why he or she refuses others.
   
   Just-in-time marketing offers companies a new way to cut through the noise while paring costs and boosting the effectiveness of every dollar they spend. By focusing on specific interested shoppers instead of spending lavishly to increase macro-level reach numbers, cross-functional teams zero in on the right consumers at the right time with innovative offers that compel them to buy. Companies currently embracing JIT marketing are pioneering an approach that will be every bit as ground shaking in the marketing sphere as JIT production has been for manufacturing.