Six Sigma: applied research for improved public relations

Communication World, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Mark Weiner

Maybe it's just human nature to focus on the most recent result rather than on patterns and trends, but it's certainly been the traditional approach to measuring public relations performance and ROI.

What's more, most public relations agencies and departments tie results only to clips rather than to meaningful business outcomes. Essentially, these two elements all but ensure that public relations' role will never be first-tier.

New methodologies and technology are being integrated today to foster the "science" of public relations and to ensure optimized public relations performance. One of the most important emerging forms of this integration is Six Sigma, a quality and performance philosophy that originated at Motorola and that is now under way at many of the world's leading companies.

WHAT IS SIX SIGMA?

Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and method for eliminating defects (or deviation). The term itself is derived from statistics, whereby one tracks "defects per million opportunities." In this case, a "defect" is described as anything outside of customer expectations. By definition, Six Sigma is less than 3.4 defects per million, or a success rate of 99.9997 percent. Given that most companies perform at a two-to-three sigma level (roughly 70 to 93 percent), a four sigma level or 99.38 percent success rate, sounds pretty good--it would mean a solid "A" in school. But it also means that 6,210 of every million airline flights would end in disaster.

Clearly the impact for achieving high quality is much more critical in some fields (air travel) than in others (pizza delivery), out the stakes are enormous if one extends the analysis to the cost of imperfection, as even a pizza company can recover tens of millions of dollars through on-time delivery, pizzas not dropped or burned, and correct orders. Clearly a lot of money is being left on the table in the course of "doing business." Six Sigma companies such as GE (US$2 billion annually), Texas Instruments (US$600 million), Johnson & Johnson (US$500 million) and Honeywell (US$1.2 billion) attribute enormous annual savings to Six Sigma.

Essentially, the purpose of Six Sigma is to gain breakthrough knowledge on how to improve processes to do things better, faster and at lower cost. It can be used to improve every facet of business, from production to human resources, to technical support and, yes, even to corporate communication. Unlike other quality-improvement efforts, some of which may have been the latest fad at your organization, Six Sigma is designed to provide tangible business results, which is to say, cost savings that are directly traceable to the bottom line.

The Six Sigma process begins by first gaining an important understanding of one's internal and external customers (in PR, internal customers are those people who fund PR; an external customer might be a journalist, an analyst, an employee or an actual customer). Second, but no less important, one must understand the needs of customers so that customer expectations can be met. Commonly used tools in the process are surveys, focus groups and customer panels, and because many of PR's internal clients are looking for media coverage, content analysis of news coverage may be critical in satisfying their needs.

A CASE STUDY: GE APPLIANCES

The Problem: In the late 1980s, Work-Out was the start of GE's quality management journey. Through Work-Out, GE created a culture open to ideas from everyone and everywhere, decimating the bureaucracy and making boundary-less behavior a reflexive, natural part of the GE culture. This created the learning environment that led to Six Sigma. Today, Six Sigma, in turn, has embedded quality thinking--process thinking--across every level and in every operation of the company, including public relations.

Although Six Sigma's customer focused, data-driven philosophy has been applied throughout GE, it had not been consistently applied to communication functions within the organization. GE Appliances' corporate communication team was convinced it could use the Six Sigma quality process to better "control" PR execution and ensure that media coverage always met or exceeded the team's targeted effectiveness/productivity measurements.

The Solution: GEA and its research partner, Delahaye, began to explore how the measurement data Delahaye compiled for the company monthly and quarterly--particularly Delahaye's Weighted Impact & Net Effect method (a proprietary formula for distilling PR effectiveness into a single score for the purposes of evaluating and planning PR programs)--could help accomplish this goal.

Beginning in 2000, GE and Delahaye worked to test, refine and verify Delahaye's method and to demonstrate that it could provide the consistently reliable data required for the Six Sigma process. Later that year, GEA began the initial series of Six Sigma analysis projects that continued into mid-2001. The business objective was to develop a real time strategy for consistently improving and controlling overall PR productivity (costs), ROI, and effectiveness in reaching and influencing GEA's target consumer, customer and investor segments.