In Defense of Marketing Intuition

The increasing power of analytics and A/B testing has transformed marketing. A tech industry recruiter told me last year that quantitative marketing skills are now the only qualification to look for in a CMO, and even the Harvard Business Review advises that we should turn off human judgment and just trust the algorithm (link).

Although I love the power of data-driven marketing, the reality is that you can't rely on data alone. Some of the toughest marketing problems defy purely analytical solutions, especially when you factor in the time it takes to run the experiments required by data-driven marketing. That issue came home to me recently when I interviewed a group of marketing execs in a project for my employer, UserTesting.

The execs, all VP level or higher, were drawn from a dozen industries ranging from furniture to finance. They all said the best marketing requires a mix of science and intuition, and several of them said we've gone too far in the direction of science.

Here's the VP of marketing at a major hospitality chain:

"Because the digital piece has provided us so much data, we have forgotten the creative side, the idea of a brand that resonates with the consumer. Trust me, I want everything to perform, but it always wins if it says 50% off. Everyone is becoming a discount provider because of that."

Others said that many less experienced marketers, steeped in analytics, struggle when it's time to make intuitive judgments. A media firm's marketing VP told me,

"Creating content and experiences is not analytics, it's having a rich and compelling understanding of who your target customer is. For the most part it's standing in the room and saying it feels right. That is a hard thing for a lot of younger marketers to do."

Why intuition persists

Two factors are keeping intuition relevant in marketing:

• In many cases, there isn't time to run analytical experiments, and
• Some marketing decisions defy numerical analysis

Let's start with the time issue: Many marketing execs told me their businesses run so fast that they constantly have to make decisions without the time to run marketing experiments, let alone full-fledged market research. As the CMO at a national clothing chain put it,

"The sales cycles are really tough. You are developing your new marketing materials, and you've got your distributor or sales meeting next week to show them. If it's a matter of a day you can include user feedback in your presentation. You can't do it if it takes two weeks."

The pace of decision-making varies from industry to industry. The fastest-paced industries seem to be those that revise their products frequently, and those with complex distribution channels. But even for slower-paced industries, intuition often plays an important role because of the job we're asking marketing teams to do. Everybody knows that marketing's primary role is to create demand, but how you create that demand also matters. Many of the execs I talked to said it's a trap to sell just on price. Instead they're looking to build lasting relationships with customers in which they'll come back over time and will pay more than commodity pricing. 

Those relationships, like any other human relationship, are based more on emotion than rational thought. It's very hard to plan and measure emotional impact through analytics. Here's what I heard from a marketing VP at a major internet company:

"You can A/B test a subject line and tell which one is best, but the more you get toward the actual behavior changes you want, some are not easy to measure. Things that might change peoples’ hearts, some of those are unmeasurable. The analytics can't tell you intent."

I found that comment especially interesting because the company is one of the most aggressive advocates of data-driven marketing.

How to mix analysis and intuition

When you combine the fast pace of decision-making and the need for an emotional connection, I think there's a compelling case for using intuition in marketing. The real question is when and how to use that intuition. The interviews suggested three priorities:

First, use data whenever you can. The fact that you have to guess sometimes is no excuse for ignoring data when you can get it. If you have time to run A/B tests or build a predictive model, do it. As the HBR article points out, intuition plus data beats either one alone.

Second, feed your intuition. Most companies that I talk with use customer research when they're kicking off a product or have questions, but I think it's also important to do less structured research and interviews to help you understand how customers think in general. What are their lives like? What problems do they worry about? The better you know your customers ahead of time, the higher-quality your intuitive guesses will be.

Third, use technology to get faster feedback. Through the Internet, it's now possible to get customer reactions to a wide variety of marketing materials in a couple of hours, fast enough to inform almost any decision. In the past that online feedback has been biased because enthusiasts online shout the loudest. You end up designing for your noisiest customers instead of typical ones. We're now getting to the point where you can get fast feedback from normal people rather than just the enthusiasts. That's what we're working on at UserTesting, and I'm excited about what it can do to improve intuitive decision-making.

What do you think?

Are marketers hitting the right balance between science and intuition? Are the marketing execs I spoke to clinging to their old seat-of-the-pants ways, when instead they should turn themselves over completely to the numbers? Do you mix intuition and analysis in your work, and if so how do you do it? I'm interested in your thoughts.