Are We Losing Our Mind (or call it Intuition)

Are we losing our minds? (or call it intuition)

Maybe the current state of the economy contributes to our insecurity. May be we are reluctant to take intuitive based initiatives for fear of failure. Or maybe it is simply an acquired behavior to rely on marketing and advertising organizations to relieve us from making any questionable decision? It is true that intuition involves more risk than traditional marketing, and as the common thinking goes, innovators are bad marketers.

Hippocrates once wrote that a doctor’s judgment mattered more than any external measurement. Take a similar case of an advertising agency, for example, which can easily overrides their client’s (judgment) intuition by making their case using marketing analysis, crunching numbers, etc. Many people – non-marketers and non-advertising professionals – can make relatively fast decisions without having to compare options. Yet they will rather believe in numbers and market analysis than trust their own intuition when making important business decisions.

Their intuition is the pattern-matching process that quickly suggests feasible courses of action, while the analysis is the mental simulation, a conscious and deliberate review of the courses of action, which was taken.

I am not implying that marketing and advertising has no place in our lives and culture. Rather, I think that too much importance has been put in the hands of marketers than in the minds of business people thus forbidding or curbing their ability to exercise intuition.

I recently read in the New York Times that Time Inc., was selecting advertising agencies to produce a campaign to encourage young and creative people to consider Detroit as a place to live and work. The winner is to be announced on Dec. 2, during an annual awards ceremony in Detroit known as the D Show.

The “D” Show?

My intuitive thinking says that D stands for poor rating, and its usage is wrong now but may have been OK in past when good times were abundant. And to promote a revival of a dying town” using a failure grade is no promise for a good future. Yet I am sure, that if I dispute the poor choice of the letter D in the final judging ceremony, I will hear about focus groups, marketing analysis, and numbers that justified the good choice of the letter D.

We are quick to blame the car companies for prompting the beginning of the downturn and running their companies to the ground as the case of GM. One should insist on asking, why don’t we hold the advertising agencies accountable for spending this year alone, according to Wall Street Journal, more than 600 million dollars, for laying out advertising campaigns and promoting products that ended bankrupting an entire industry? These are advertising agencies that were promoting mediocre products and building and shaping imaginary consumers who were supposed to fit the product they were advertising. Why are they untouched?

One advertising executive who addressed this issue was Tara Comonte of Mediabrands, who said in an interview with Advertising Age that “I'm comfortable with accountability and our ability to deliver and drive value, and that is something in a climate like this that is attractive to our clients. If we drive their business results, it's a win-win. This to me is a time for change and a time for us as an industry to embrace that change... There's nothing wrong with us being held accountable for our performance or value we deliver and that's not what the current models do”.

I personally take great interest in the art of intuition, which in my opinion, leads to simplicity in thinking. It makes good advertising. I go by the guiding rule that nothing can be true, but that which is simple. And “simple” is not presenting a 60-page market analysis. Simplicity is using a healthy intuition too.

I personally believe in brand communications that takes on a less rigid approach than other agencies typically use. When faced with the challenge of naming, for example, I don’t take on the over-analytical approach. I believe that too much analysis just delays decisions and defeats the whole mission of naming a brand. I rather see my clients test a name, listen to people they respect, listen a lot to their gut feelings (intuition) and come up with a choice. I advise them to start with “their” ideas and those of their staff rather than spending their time commissioning and reading analysis and other scientific arguments, which may or may not, go against their intuition.

This debate between intuition and empiricism (knowledge which derives from experience) is as old as Plato, who thought that knowledge came from intuitive reasoning, and Aristotle, who preferred observation.

People can make relatively fast decisions without having to compare options. Let us re-connect with our sense of intuition ability. Trust ourselves more so we don’t exercise too much analysis and get buried under numbers we really don’t understand. Simplify our life.

(Warning: Do not attempt to build a 30-floor high-rise based on your intuition only.)