Intuition Feeds Discovery, MarketingTesting Provides the Proof

Intuition will often reward us with breakthrough ideas, providing valid reason to trust in our personal inclinations as it leads to success.  Without those breakthrough ideas, businesses would lack differentiation and be static in their progress.  However, what this same intuition often fails to identify or predict is which tactic, strategy or marketing message will be most effective.

Clients typically partner with advertising agencies and various consultants in an effort to obtain a fresh professional perspective, prevent redundancy of direction, avoid stagnant thought and infuse creativity. Frequently clients, without recognizing it, bring with them an emotional investment in a particular set of familiar ideas or established processes.

Sometimes Old Replaces New

As marketing professionals, we also have a habit of forming emotional attachments to ideas and processes which bring our clients success. Each side must avoid pitting themselves against the other as intuitions, varying in experience, collide. 

As intuition feeds discovery, it is important not to abandon the scientific processes that yield statistical proof. Intuition is most effective in determining what should be tested, but that same intuition tends to fail both the client and the agency members to a significant extent when it attempts to predict an outcome in a test. Intuition also fails when applied to initial results, especially where provisional results appear to prove your own opinion correct.

Employ Best Practices to Learn, Intuitive Testing to Improve

Intuition and marketing testing are not mutually exclusive.  If anything, they are symbiotic. Utilizing intuition as your lone guide feels good, but it reflects nothing more than a blind flight on the wings of hope. On the other hand, performing scientific tests while remaining closed off to intuitive leaps only constricts breakthrough thinking. Often the most valuable lesson learned is not what performs best, but reaching deeper into why.

Niche Karma advocates the testing process as a means to a neutral resolution to opposite or varying intuitive opinions. Testing is also necessary in many situations where all parties are in accord to ensure that redundancy of thought does not impede progress.

Until there is scientific support, it is just another theory.