Marketing Meets Manufacturing: Unlocking Growth Through Efficiency

How would you feel if, in order to be profitable, your company decided to increase your workload by 26x? It may sound hyperbolic, but that’s precisely what the retail sector is enduring. Fifty-two micro seasons, with a never-ending sprint of launches and promotions that keep teams in a state of frantic production. With such a demanding pace, it’s easy to get focused on keeping up, even at the expense of doing what works best.  

We’ve had our own versions of this struggle behind the scenes at DCG ONE. It took years for us to find frameworks that could help us blend our creative agency and print manufacturing because we were busy doing the work for our customers. It’s a great problem to have, but stepping out of our daily workload to consider the bigger picture has supercharged our output in more ways than we can count. What we learned (and what we bring to our clients in retail, procurement, and manufacturing) is how to bring a manufacturing mindset to marketing. 

Hear me out: This isn’t an article where I suggest that your marketing should reflect a cookie-cutter formula or prioritize quantity over quality. We see every project–whether print or digital–like building custom cars, each one uniquely tailored to the customer's needs. 
 
Really, a manufacturing mindset is about prioritizing how we create as much as what we create.  

Great ideas will only take us so far if our time, resources, and processes make them impossible to implement. So how do we structure marketing in a way that enables high-quality experiences at the speed of the market? Here’s a few lessons we learned from our own evolution and years of helping clients across industries. 

Uniting marketing and operations 

One of the biggest hurdles in fast-paced industries like retail is bridging the gap between marketing and operations. If we don’t have a close eye on how logistics impact marketing (and vice versa), we can inadvertently set ourselves up for the blame game. Delayed approvals, last-minute changes, long delivery times, and so many other hiccups in the process dull the impact of marketing initiatives–sometimes even leading to the belief that they don’t work. A manufacturing mindset calls on us to bring more efficiency and scale to the way marketing get done. 

Part of the reason DCG ONE created our proprietary platform, the Customer Experience Portal (CXP), is to help create more transparency for our clients. Not just between us and them, but also between their internal teams. When you and your team get visibility into everything from product status to performance, you get the power to be proactive. Retail and procurement leaders get to align their spending with what works, which should streamline the workload over time. 

On our own teams, this has also meant creating more crossfunctional collaboration. We improved parity in similar roles across teams, then restructured our projects so people could collaborate in new ways. As a result, we’ve seen smoother handoffs from the agency to print manufacturing, engineering, or other departments. Because we focus on how we create, our teams can deliver better work faster. 

Creating hybrid customer experiences 

Managing consistency across locations, brand partnerships, channels, and vendors leaves a lot of room for error. In the case of retail’s breakneck pace, the need for a single reprint of signage can jeopardize an entire campaign! Many of our clients have reduced these disruptions by adopting more digital strategies in their physical spaces.  

Digital signage and technologies like Near Field Communication or extended reality help retailers create more shopper engagement through more timely and personalized experiences. The pandemic ushered in no-touch tech like QR codes and tap-to-pay, and now leading brands are using them to make the in-person shopping experience more immersive and interactive–even when there’s no sales associate available to help.  

These digital engagements have the added bonus of being more easily trackable, so brands can serve their customers while learning more about them. This timely customer data could help your company extend the interaction from store to inbox–reminding them of products they engaged with or sharing an offer tailored to the brands they love. This evolution of traditional retail displays can help marketing leaders understand the quantifiable impact of their signage instead of printing and hoping.  

Calling back to the idea of a manufacturing mindset in marketing, Integrating these digital touchpoints also brings some helpful efficiency. When your print materials become more trackable, you can optimize and invest more wisely. When digital signage reduces logistics, it can speed up your time to market with new ideas. 

Looking forward together 

Much like in manufacturing, marketing is going through its own lean renaissance. Companies across industries are determined to understand what marketing activities bring the most value or reduce costs. Getting the answers requires us to look within and out at the world.  

When we get to know a new prospective client, questions about emerging trends always rise to the surface early. People are hungry to know what their options are–and if they’re missing out. Adaptability and innovation are high on their list of priorities, but marketing leaders don’t always have the time to keep up with the zeitgeist. That’s where we come in. 

Partnering with DCG ONE can be like finding the missing piece in your assembly line. We take the pressure off of strained marketing teams and quickly expand their capabilities to include specialized skill sets and the latest technology–capacity that would have taken much more time and expense to build internally. We pride ourselves on having a deep bench of experts who can help you solve almost any marketing problem–without losing valuable time.  

If it’s time to take a magnifying glass to the cracks, leaks, and outdated bits of your marketing, contact us. We’d love to help you brainstorm how your marketing can become a well-oiled machine.