Trust Your Gut? That’s Cute. Try Trusting the Customer Data.

The Gist

Intuition to insight. Marketing leaders are shifting from gut-based decisions to AI-powered, research-driven strategies.
Cross-functional advantage. Partnering with CX and Insights teams unlocks faster, more accurate customer understanding.
Culture of action. Insight-driven marketing cultures outperform by learning continuously and turning research into decisions.

In the world today, marketing teams are under enormous pressure to drive real-time outcomes, with measurable results. At the same time, consumer expectations are shifting at a breakneck pace and understanding their motivations, preferences and perceptions is becoming one of the biggest and most pressing challenges marketers face.

Customer experience leaders are under the same pressure but with the advent of many agile, AI-aided research tools, getting rich, actionable customer insight is becoming achievable in hours as opposed to weeks or months. Bringing these teams together can be an antidote to CMO stress.

Why Gut Instinct Isn’t Enough Anymore

While we’re often given the advice throughout our lives to trust our guts, that’s not always the best approach when it comes to understanding the customer. In fact, intuition, while a powerful enabler in many ways, usually relies on personal experience littered with mental models, bias and personal perspective. Unless you are your target consumer, these things can serve to cloud your judgment and create the illusion that you know better.

Spoiler alert: When it comes to customers, we rarely know them better than they know themselves. Transitioning from guesswork or instinct to data-backed, deep customer understanding will elevate not only the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, but also your customer experience.

The Shift From Intuition to Insight
Why Insights Matter in Customer Experience and Marketing
The Process of Generating and Applying Customer Insights
What’s in it for Marketing?
The Challenge to Win Hearts and Minds in Marketing and CX
Building an Insight-Driven Culture in Marketing … and Beyond
What Would Don Draper Do?
Core Questions About Insight-Driven Marketing Strategy

The Shift From Intuition to Insight

Think about one of pop culture’s favorite marketers – Don Draper of Mad Men. Go back and watch the scene where Don politely accepts the research folder and then throws it in the trash can. Most CX and insights leaders can deeply connect with that poor research leader who watched the genius ad man take months of work and disregard it without a second thought.

Historically, marketers, like Don, relied heavily on experience, gut feelings and anecdotal evidence to steer their campaigns. And for a long time, they were actually pretty successful as their billboards, magazine and TV ads could capture the zeitgeist in ways that still cause us to talk about the Marlboro man, Mr. Clean and teaching the world to buy a Coke.

It’s clear that times have changed; marketing channels have exploded, and consumers have exponential choices in what to buy and how to buy it. With all due respect for his artistic genius, Mr. Draper likely never considered a world with social media.

As digital touchpoints grew and consumer journeys became more complex, the limitations of listening to our guts have become clear. Marketing leaders who partner closely with their CX and Insights peers are going to create a distinct advantage because those folks, and their teams, are spending almost all of their time learning from and about the customer you both serve. Leveraging the breadth and depth of available research capabilities will make the marketing job easier and more effective, allowing you to uncover patterns, predict behaviors and trends and measure your marketing performance.

The character Don Draper throwing away a piece of trash, in an image generated by AI. — In a nod to the Mad Men era, a sharply dressed executive discards a sheet of paper—symbolizing the outdated habit of ignoring customer research. Today’s marketers can’t afford to throw insights away. Partnering with CX and Insights teams is no longer optional—it’s the key to smarter, faster, more effective campaigns.Simpler Media Group, generated by AI.

Why Insights Matter in Customer Experience and Marketing

You understand the target customer. By understanding customers’ needs, preferences and pain points, marketers can personalize messaging and product offerings, enhancing the overall customer experience and business outcomes.

You upend assumptions: Insights replace assumptions with data, enabling teams to challenge pre-conceived notions and validate (or invalidate) hypotheses before committing precious resources.
You become more efficient: Decisions built from insights reduce spending, improve precision and maximize return on investment.
You create competitive advantage: Relevant and timely insights allow marketing teams to anticipate market shifts, spot opportunities and respond to competitive moves before they become threats.

The Process of Generating and Applying Customer Insights

Insight creation happens when multiple pieces of data converge with expertise and context to create new learning. Customer experience and insights teams do not react to distinct pieces of data. Rather, they are following a systematic approach to ensure that insights are reflective of trends and learning is relevant, actionable and important to the business.

The process often works like this:

CX Insights Step	Description
Data Collection	Insights teams work to pull together both quantitative (call center metrics, web traffic, complaint tracking, surveys) and qualitative (focus group feedback, customer interviews and sentiment analysis) data. These days, they are likely using sophisticated AI-powered tools to do this reducing the time and effort.
Data Analysis	CX teams move beyond individual pieces of data to uncover the “why” behind what they are seeing, identifying trends and hypotheses, often with the help of sentiment analysis.
Insight Extraction	This is where the magic happens as the analysis phase culminates in the development of meaningful, actionable insights, creating new ways to think about a problem or a challenge. For example, identifying that a particular demographic responds strongly to certain messaging or that a certain product feature is driving complaints. Insights pros ensure that the insights developed are specific, relevant and tied to measurable outcomes.
Decision Making and Implementation	Armed with insights, marketing teams can make data-backed decisions that both de-risk costly campaigns and improve results. Insights peers can use some of the time savings from new technologies on the front end of this process to invest in making recommendations to the business and driving action.
Measurement and Refinement	Because of the rigor in this process, teams can measure the impact of their decisions, learning from both successes and setbacks. By refining campaigns in real time and integrating new learnings, marketers can ensure ongoing improvement and sustained growth.

Modern Research Tools Change the Game

With all of this in mind, marketing leaders should be the first in line to work with insights teams and not following Don Draper’s willful ignorance of all things research related. Impactful and meaningful learning can be done in near real-time with CX experts leading the charge and the old excuses — “Insights take too long,” or “Research is too expensive,” – simply don’t apply anymore.

What’s in it for Marketing?

Insights in Action: What Marketing Gains

Of course, the proof is what really matters to busy marketing leaders and here are just a few ways that insights can drive progress for your team and business.

Personalization: Segmentation research can lead to insights about how particular segments interact with your brand which can translate to new ways of personalizing the experience.
Lead Generation: Competitive insights can help to identify opportunities to target underserved populations.
Content Strategy: Resonance testing can create better engagement with current customers.
Positioning: A/B Testing can offer clues into how certain features or offers will land with customers.

The Challenge to Win Hearts and Minds in Marketing and CX

CX professionals know and love the art of the possible. But there are actual challenges that need to be managed when encouraging your marketing peers to work with the CX and Insights teams.

Data challenge: While insights depend on the convergence of data with business expertise, getting to the data isn’t always as easy – or realistic – as we’d like. Silos exist, and even the best CX and marketing teams are only as good as the data they have available to them.
People challenge: Sometimes big egos can get in the way of big wins. When interests collide, marketing leaders and CX leaders may not always see eye to eye on the way to proceed with what’s been learned.
Skills challenge: Not every insight immediately translates to action. In some cases, it is cumulative learning that occurs over time that can drive outcomes, but discipline and skill are needed to know when to push forward and when more data is needed.

Building an Insight-Driven Culture in Marketing … and Beyond

Creating a Culture That Values Insight

As with so many things, culture can make or break success and an insight-driven culture requires several key components to drive outcomes:

Leaders playing nice. Leaders set the tone for their entire team. If the CMO believes deeply in the value of insights, it is likely her team will as well.
High functioning cross functional teams. Insights require the collection and management of data across the entire organization. Rallying around customer experience can bring these teams together like nothing else, and highlighting the interdependence of the data ecosystem is at the heart of purpose-driven collaboration.
Continual learning and sharing. Insights teams that hoard knowledge will fail. Every time. Share not just the insights, but the skills and tools that help to create them.
Shout from the rooftops. Whether an insight immediately drives revenue or a misstep with execution creates an interesting pivot powered by customer learning, sharing the wins and the “fail forwards” will directly feed the insights culture you want to create.

What Would Don Draper Do?

In days gone by, was it possible to use your gut to make creative, impactful marketing decisions that hit the bullseye with customers? Absolutely. It still is today.

But the safe bet — the one that de-risks your decisions and ensures that you’ve kept customer learning at the center of your decision making — is the one that leverages your partnership with Customer Insights to harness deep insights to adapt, predict, outpace and deliver.

Even Don Draper himself would raise a glass to that.

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