Human beings are wired to make connections from birth using intuition. Usually that is a good thing. But we are entering an era when marketers need to stop using their intuition and start using data. If they don’t, they will fall behind those that do.
When one of my kids was three years old (yeah, this was a long time ago), we took her to her second dental appointment. After the appointment, she asked where the party was. Yeah, we laughed, until we saw that she was serious. She legitimately expected that she would be taken to a party after her dental appointment.
At first, my wife and I were flummoxed. We explained to her that there was no party, but why would she think such a thing? Slowly it dawned on us that we had taken her directly to her friend’s birthday party right after her first dental appointment six months ago. She had one data point for dental appointments, and she intelligently remembered everything that went with dental appointments. Including the birthday party.
So, we were relieved to think that our daughter was a genius instead of insane, but it shows something that we all do. We overgeneralize from one incident or a few incidents. We connect things together that aren’t statistically significant. We especially do this when the incident is emotional, good or bad. Over the years, we learn not to associate birthday parties with dental appointments because we have enough of both that we realize that they are independent. But our instincts–or intuition–is to make connections, even when they make no sense.
Marketers suffer from this reliance on our lizard brain as much as anyone–maybe more, because many marketers went into the profession as a refuge from math. They are more creative than analytical, in many cases, and they tend to make connections based on their experience, rather than data.
Don’t let this happen to you. What was okay ten or even five years ago is hopelessly outdated now. Data is all around us, and the smart marketers are using it. The rest are slowly becoming less important.
It’s not that there is no place for creativity. There is a gaping need for it. It is just that we need to be willing to judge our creativity based on quantitative feedback, not interesting stories. Urban legend marketing is on its way out–fast. Don’t get swept out with it.
