Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head:
How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits
By Kevin Clancy & Peter Krieg
Published: Mar 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-471-97993-7
Format: Hardcover, 304pp
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Nothing is more important to a company than marketing, write co-authors Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg, in their important new book Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head: How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits. Making an organization's marketing more effective, through implementation of hard data and quantifiable information, is the key to the company's success.
Kevin Clancy (photo left) and Peter Krieg move far beyond the intuition based decision making that is prevalent in many corporations today. The authors show multi-million dollar product campaigns that were begun with almost no consideration of marketing to the end customer. If any market research was conducted at all, it was either of the most rudimentary sort, or based on an unmeasurable and questionable instinct of the decision makers. All too often, the product failed to sell, as a result. The authors demonstrate that there is a better way to conduct a marketing plan, and to show how marketing has a measurable and positive return on investment.
The authors walk their talk, and the book is a powerful textbook for the application of hard research data to marketing. They start out by providing the tools to give an organization an overall marketing exam. They follow up this internal evaluation with techniques for finding the ideal target market for a product or service, and how to position it in the marketplace. Instead of simple guesswork, solid and reliable information, facts, and data are applied to the problem. To the surprise of many executives, their vaunted instincts and conventional wisdom. are often proven very wrong.
Peter Krieg (photo left) and Kevin Clancy understand that for many executives, marketing is equated with advertising. While they don't ignore advertising, and indeed provide great advice for making paid advertising more effective, the authors consider marketing in the larger corporate picture. Marketing is what drives the entire organization, and should be considered at every stage of product development, production, and sales distribution. The basis for this holistic marketing approach to business, is measurement of reliable and factual data in the proper manner, not some random gut instinct of what might feel right at the time.
For me, the power of the book is its no nonsense approach to the implementation of hard data and facts to marketing. The authors demonstrate clearly that there is no substitute for reliable information that is proven to be correct. Popular psychological theories may have their place in the initial stages of data collection, but the writers expand that research well past that starting point. The step by step marketing techniques presented in the book are based on finding the facts, and acting upon them. A crucial and powerful message of the book, is hard data will prevent costly mistakes, that often result from a faulty decision making process.
I highly recommend Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head: How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits by Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg, for anyone who is serious about applying factual information to their marketing plan. Instead of guesswork and intuition, and the sad discovery that money is being wasted on advertising, sponsorships, and chasing the wrong target market, this book provides the framework for generating a positive return on your marketing investment.
Read Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head: How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits by Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg, and start making the right business and marketing decision based on the facts, as your head is definitely much smarter than your gut.
