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The Power of Intuition Won't Keep Your Marketing Strategy Charged During a Recession Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg say a marketing strategy based on instinct is risky business indeed in new ChangeThis Manifesto February 6, 2008 (Boston, MA)—According to a survey by executive search firm Christian and Timbers, 45% of corporate executives report that they now rely more on instinct than on facts and figures in running their businesses. But as a recession looms ever larger, these execs may want to rethink their approach, particularly where their marketing strategy is concerned. As Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg of Copernicus point out, there are at least two decades worth of data from which to draw conclusions about the “power” of hunches and feelings to lead to business success. Contrary to conventional wisdom and even accounts in the business press, examples of pure hunch leading to unbelievable performance and legendary success remain few and far between. In their newly-released ChangeThis Manifesto, the authors of Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head challenge the hype and attention heaped upon intuition as a transformative managerial tool, and make the case that when it comes to marketing strategy decisions, the ratio of success where gut instinct made the call is as miserably low as it is elsewhere. One of the best kept secrets in American business today, say Clancy and Krieg, is that the average ROI of most marketing programs is zero or negative. In fact, study after study, using different methodologies, approaches, and data, all come to the same conclusion that the current ROI is zero or negative. For example:
Krieg blames the popularity of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking for perpetuating an over-reliance on intuition to formulate a marketing strategy and jeopardizing careers in the process: “Chief marketing officers who are hooked on a feeling and embrace the idea of ‘thinking without thinking’ may help explain why the average CMO tenure is only 26 months.” “The great news is that marketing executives have started to understand that making faultless gut decisions about their marketing strategy is not going to lead to an advantage in the marketplace. More and more they are turning to statistics and hard research to balance intuition and are seeing enormous success,” said Clancy. With prognosticators already predicting significant cutbacks in marketing spending if the economy continues along at its current less-than-breakneck pace, what you do with every marketing dollar will be under more scrutiny than ever. Clancy and Krieg maintain that when it comes to business decisions, nothing beats a balance of personal judgment and seasoned experience with careful analysis of unimpeachable data. Marketing is no different. Intuition has a poor track record when it comes to financial performance, and there’s a much better method of ensuring the success of your brands and business during the looming recession. Click here to read "The Power of Intuition: And Why Its The Biggest Myth in American Business Today." For
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