If you know me, you know that I'm an analytic. An unabashed follower of the scientific method -- even in the emotional and intuitive field of marketing.

The man at the right is W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and father of Total Quality Management. The guy who had more impact on 20th-century Japanese economic might than any other gaijin. The person who helped Toyota and Matsushita come from out of nowhere to become the biggest and toughest competitors in the world. Right, that Deming.

The core of his work was statistical examination of business processes at a system-wide level, and to focus relentlessly on optimizing the global objective function of the business.

So how could I be haranguing against that kind of hyper-rational approach? Because for critical parts of marketing and strategy, it just doesn't work. It actually gets in the way. Companies who think they will be more innovative with TQM or Six Sigma are in for a surprise.

The Six-Sigma Journey to Oblivion
Probably the biggest part of Deming's work that made it to the US is Six-Sigma management, which focuses on improving business by making an entire business process perform with such consistency that there are fewer than 4 defects per million activities.

Some pretty important companies have adopted Six-Sigma practices: Motorola, General Electric, Sun Micro, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Allied Signal. Related process-level improvement can be seen throughout high tech in ISO 9000 and 9001 initiatives.

And in their domain, these business process improvements are all good. Quality -- from the product experience to the way you process orders to the courtesy of your call center -- is important and has been getting better in the US. Customers like quality, right? So what's the problem?

There are two major definitions for Quality, each of which in theoryhelps you be in tune with your customers and make great, profitable products. But follow them blindly, and you take your company over the cliff.

"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

Quality is Consistent Conformance to Specifications
The more complex a product or service, the more ways there are to disappoint customers. Remember how frustrating it was the last time your computer crashed and your lost a few hours' work? Some problem in the 100,000,000 lines of hand-crafted code that Redmond crammed into your PC. And how about the last time your health insurance company mis-processed a claim, leaving you with hours of hassle on the phone. Some flaky policy or mistake in a business process.

Conformance to specifications is a terrific idea for keeping customers. For example, the specifications and documentation for a Boeing 747 weigh more than the aircraft itself: but if those 450 tons of docs keep the plane up in the air, keep that paper flowing! As Boeing's reputation for quality (conformance to specifications) spread, the branding effects got them new customers.

For established products, great. The problem is for innovative new products: how do you write those specifications you're going to conform to?

Some amazing commercial failures have happened with new products that were made exactly as specified. Think Ford's Edsel. Think Motorola's Iridium. Think the New Coke. Think the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin. Perfect products that nobody wanted.

Here's the bitter irony: the longer and more detailed the product specification, the more likely a truly innovative product is to fail. Sorry, Eddy. Time to think Agile Product Management.

Six-sigma methodologies cannot bring you innovation: an iPod, or - in their day - a Macintosh, a Lisa, or an Apple II would never happened from a "normal" company. At best, normal companies with the world's most advanced development processes make the Star and the Alto: incredible advancements that aren't right for the market. (Check out Triumph of the Nerds for a terrific view of this.)

Visionary products have to be created from whole cloth out of the vendor's imagination because 98% of customers won't know they want it yet, let alone be able to tell you what the design tradeoffs should be. Formulaic approaches to product design only work when you're imitating something that a trail-blazer has already made popular. If you're a large player, your definition of "innovation" means copy and cost-reduce. But if you're a smaller company, you've got to discover and create value out of thin air.

Even more profoundly, with real innovation you have to design your customer at the same time you design your product. By this I mean you have to figure out who the customer is so you can design for their specific needs...then you have to figure out how you're going to reach them to develop demand and start a sales cycle.

Quality is Improving the Ratio of Total Results to Total Costs
This second definition of quality is a truism, as the ratio stated above is also the definition of "profit". But there are significant measurement issues here because neither total results nor total costs can be quantified in the short term (when you're making the decisions). The real long-run costs of a product or service are often invisible or hidden in reserve accounts (Enron comes to mind here) and may never be truly grasped. Likewise, the total results of a product -- like the impact of the iPod on Macintosh sales -- can be tough to isolate after the fact, let alone quantify on a monthly basis.

A more simplistic interpretation of this second definition is "reduction of waste and re-work." While the idea of great marketing is to maximize total results and minimize waste, the actual practice of marketing involves a lot of experimentation -- some of it very costly. Worse still, large parts of marketing involve non-repeatable events (e.g., you can only introduce your product once) whose lessons can only be generalized. This goes double for products and services with fad appeal (think movies, music, or videogames).

But it's those fads and singularities that make for hits -- and one-time events are what start Geoffrey Moore's "tornadoes." In other words, the outrageous profit opportunities.

Click here to read David Taber's ten recommendations for quality marketing.

David Taber leads David Taber + Associates , a business development and marketing consultancy. This article is excerpted from a piece which originally appeared in The Taber Report newsletter. Contents copyright 2007 by DOTnet Consulting, Inc, all rights reserved.