Making Marketing More Journalistic
Here’s an excerpt from the lead article in my latest newsletter, about taking a more journalistic approach to studying and serving consumers:
A few weeks ago I heard Malcolm Gladwell speak to an audience of homebuilding industry CEOs about how people make decisions or judgments. That is also the general topic of his most recent book, “Blink,” which explores two ways of decision-making: 1) the data-driven to the nth degree, information-full judgment call, and 2) the seemingly more gut-based judgment call. You probably know where he took it from there – toward giving the “gut” type a bit more credit.
In this time of economic downturn, it is worth it for marketers do just that. The data has not served us all that well lately (part of why the country is in the mess), and, here’s the thing: Most of you reading this newsletter are primed for very well educated gut decisions as it is. Simply because of your years of experience in marketing decision-making, your brain is well fertilized for growing wise and quick judgment calls based on less input. You just have to trust that this is so, and educate your colleagues to do the same.
One way to get more practice at the gut approach is to take a more journalistic approach to gathering and using information - another point I took from Gladwell’s presentation. Consider that journalists have been trained to filter out helpful and unhelpful input very quickly, and they have absolute parameters (in time and budget) that force them to make judgment calls or raise points with a lot less data and a lot more gut.
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For those of you who don’t know, I publish a quarterly newsletter which includes an article and bits from the news, notice of new research or blog posts that caught my eye. When you subscribe, you get the first chapter of Don’t Think Pink in PDF form (whether you want it or not!), and then will be on the list to receive the next one - at this point, that is mid-October.
I will be adding past newsletter articles (not the additional tidbits) to this site over the next few weeks. They will be listed in the “Articles” archive.
