A prerequisite for a successul benchmarking study is to have a Total Quality Management system in place within the organization. Modern quality management entails customer satisfaction, it prefers prevention against inspection and it recognizes the managerial team’s responsibility for quality.
Sometimes it can be difficult to predict marketing performance and there are cases when expensive campaigns might not bring the desired results. Hence, marketing research and benchmarking represent important aspects that can help organizations not only measure their performance, but also find ways to predict and improve it.
In the search for best practices in the industry, companies need to look after some key aspects that can lead them to achieving superior performance. The benchmarking methodological uniqueness refers to the identification of business processes that can lead an organization to a superior performance, followed by the analysis of the best practices behind that success.
As all businesses are in a continuous search for improving their organizational processes, one of the main actions that needs to be taken for seeing quality improvements and achieving a superior level of performance is closing the gaps. Improvement refers to the process through which performance gaps are actually closed, so that a company is able to achieve the desired results. The aspect that can always be improved is performance. Therefore, improvement is not a results issue, but a performance related one.
The process of developing a benchmarking team is essential in order to be able to conduct a benchmarking study that aligns to the actual organizational strategies and identifies the right targets. It is one of the most important aspects that determines the success of the benchmarking plan. Hence, when conducting a benchmarking research, the responsible team can make the difference between success and failure.