Your Gut is Good, Your Brain is Better
When you fall in love with something, whether it's an idea or a person, the initial thrill tends to be visceral - the excitement comes from the gut. Perhaps you meet a woman you find attractive and with whom you feel a certain chemistry. Attraction and chemistry are not intellectual creatures; they live in id. We have similar relationships with ideas. Ideas ignite passion and excitement because they represent new and different. In both cases - the idea and the woman - the original exuberance is completely necessary, but realistically unreliable. Most ideas falter when put through a rational grinder, and most relationships fail when you get past the honeymoon stage.
There is a long list of things that must occur and exists between two people in order for a relationship to work. Honest communication is one; a cycle of positive feedback is another. These are measurable, intellectual aspects of a relationship that help two people grow closer together. We need to look at ideas in the same way, especially when we are talking about marketing, because what is marketing other than a series of ideas that, when grouped together, are designed to inspire growth. We need to make marketing more scientific, more accountable, and ultimately, more effective. That's what Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg are here to help us do with, Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head.
We're already seeing things change in the world of marketing and advertising in this respect - Think GoogleAds. People want to know where the money is going and whether it is worth it. Marketing has always been a slightly different creature because we tend to view it more organically. But ultimately, marketing needs to work for whatever purpose for which we want it to work, and in order to know if that happens, we need to be able to measure.
Like with the relationship, the gut is still important for generating new ideas and sparking lively dialogue, but we just can't rely on slogans and gimmicks anymore without knowing what they accomplish. Marketing needs to transform from being 90 / 10 art to science ratio to something far more disciplined. That's why the first thing the authors do in this book is explain what disciplined marketing looks like. After all, how can you perform disciplined marketing if you don't know what it looks like?
The goal here is to make marketing accountable and measurable in order to get quantifiable results. In theory, this newer scientific approaches should revolutionize marketing much the same way that Six Sigma revolutionized manufacturing. Ultimately, what the authors are saying is that any fact-based approach will beat out a gut-based approach almost every time. And if you look at the current state of gov...nevermind...won't even go there.
Like any other part or division or aspect of a business, marketing must answer to the bottom line. For decades it hasn't, but as consumers get smarter and have more access to technology and learning resources, we have to also be smarter about our marketing. It not only needs to inspire visceral reactions, it needs to work. And it not only needs to work, we now have to know why and how it is working. We have to measure it.
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