Seth Godin is a strong proponent of big ideas. He likes it when smart insights takes a company into territory that is way beyond the ordinary.
So it was interesting to see his post this morning about the value of process.
He argues that while intuition will take you places that process never can…process will always be a more reliable way to increase ROI.
We think he’s right.
Our recent research brief on Marketer’s Intuition, while recognizing that intuition is vital to make those big leaps, demonstrates very clearly that a marketer’s intuition is generally very unreliable.
During a teleconference call on this topic, we asked our audience to look at three headlines we had already tested, and tell us which of the three they thought delivered the highest conversion rate.
Over half of our expert audience picked the worst-performing headline.
This is a difficult subject to address within any organization.
On the one hand you want to encourage creativity and bold thinking, while on the other you need to quietly remind people that their intuition is very likely to be wrong.
And that, perhaps, is the true nature of intuitive thinking. One is wrong most of the time. But when we’re right, amazing things can happen.
