What is Intuitive Marketing?

The Intuition Myth — It’s a Doozey

The Case for Fact-Based Marketing

We’ll be honest, we’re big time advocates for fact-based marketing and a research-driven approach to business decisions. It should come as no surprise then that the reverence for go-with-your-gut corporate heroes has us completely mystified. “The most widely celebrated heroes of capitalism are the Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mark Cuban-types—the ones who scorn what the focus groups and the gurus say and follow their superior instincts into the highest possible tax bracket,” New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker wrote recently in a piece for Fast Company. If you look at the data to determine how many times intuition, gut feel, and hunches alone lead to legendary success, you’ll see—in stark contrast to the results of a more fact-based marketing approach—it’s a pretty rare occurrence indeed.

Intuition lends itself no better to marketing than any other type of business decision. There’s a creative element to marketing, to be sure, but the odds that a marketer’s intuition about what buyers want and need will lead to a successful marketing campaign or new product, never mind increased profitability for the firm, are pretty slim. The data doesn’t support the behavior:

• The average ROI of most marketing programs is zero or negative.
• Nielsen reports a 95% new product failure rate
• The University of Michigan discovered that the average cross-industry customer satisfaction score has fallen below 75%.
• The Marketing Science Institute determined that a 100% increase in advertising expenditures yields just a 1% increase in sales.
• ROI measurement firm Marketing Management Analytics found that major media advertising for consumer packaged goods brands returns 54 cents on the dollar and campaigns for non-consumer packaged goods brands, 87 cents on the dollar—two losing propositions.
• A Deutsche Bank study of packaged goods brand found that just 18% of television ad campaigns generated a positive ROI in the short-term; less than half (45%) saw any ROI payoff over the long run.
• Copernicus Marketing Consulting observed that brand equity is in decline in 48 or 51 categories where buyers perceive the leading brands as more similar than different, and make purchase decisions based on price rather than product and service attributes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Great brands, exceptionally-performing companies, and business legends come not from gut-thinking and intuition, but from fact-based marketing—a careful balance of judgment, creativity, and sophisticated analysis of unimpeachable marketing research data.

To learn more about how Copernicus Marketing Consulting can help you with fact-based marketing, read about our marketing consulting services.

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