What you’ll read: In this modern, data-driven world, sometimes it’s best to reply more on our intuition. Netflix’s CMO show us how.
In our series where we derive marketing lessons from popular TED talks, we usually focus on talks that don’t focus on marketing at all.
But when Netflix’s Chief Marketing Officer, Bozoma Saint John, stepped onto the stage this past August, we took notice.
In just over twelve minutes, Saint John flips the idea of being completely data-driven on its head. Instead, she insists that we marketers start trusting our intuition a bit more, even in this modern, data-heavy world.
We dug a bit deeper into Saint John’s TED Talk to better understand how to inject both data and intuition into our decision-making processes.
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The Value of Intuition
In the modern, data-driven world of marketing, intuition has all but fallen to the wayside.
Unfortunately, teams that have pushed their intuitive decision-making initiatives to the backburner may miss out on a ton of opportunities.
Intuition Surfaces Emotions and Enables Empathy
Intuition brings human emotion into the spotlight — and allows marketers to empathize with their audience in a truly authentic way.
Yes, AI-powered marketing tools like Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis continue to evolve,. and to be sure, they can analyze a ton of qualitative data in the blink of an eye.
But, in relying solely on these automated interpretations of your customers’ emotions and perspectives, you may unwittingly take the human aspect out of the equation altogether. Sure, you can identify the basic “mood” of a recent customer engagement — but there’s still a divide that keeps you from truly seeing the actual person behind the engagement.
From there, it becomes easier and easier to start treating your customers as mere numbers.
When intuition comes into play though, you’re free to go past the “on-paper” customer data and can instead focus on gaining a holistic understanding of who they are, and how your brand fits into their lives. What’s more, you’ll be better able to showcase the human side of your organization as you cater to your audience’s needs.
Intuition Helps Define the Indefinable
No matter how much data you collect on your customers, it will never paint a complete picture of their journey with your brand.
Intuition Leads to A-Ha Moments and Creative Breakthroughs
There’s also a limit to how far your marketing data will take you in terms of creativity and innovation.
Again, though AI technology is quickly gaining ground in this area, the human capacity to think outside-the-box is a gift we simply cannot take for granted.
As Saint John explains, relying solely on data leads to limited, linear thinking and stunted efforts:
You identify a problem, use data to find a solution, solve it…and that’s that. Your team’s need and drive to think creatively stops the moment you’ve solved the problem at hand.
Allowing intuition to drive your team’s actions, then, will prompt them to dig deeper into every initiative they face, and to always look for ways to “do more” in specific areas. In turn, your marketing team will consistently find themselves ahead of the status quo — and your brand will ultimately come to be known for the innovative ways in which you deliver value to your customers.
Intertwining Marketing Data and Intuition
By now, it should be pretty clear that being fully driven — either by data or intuition — isn’t the best course of action.
Rather, it’s allowing the two to intertwine that will allow your marketingteam, and your brand as a whole, to thrive.
Let’s take a look at how to make this happen.
Use Data to Build a Foundation
In her TED Talk, Saint John talks about one of her first marketing gigs, where her boss shared that data would be “extraordinarily important” to the success of her ideas.
As a relative newcomer to the world of marketing, she simply didn’t have the knowledge and experience needed to operate on intuition only.
Knowing this, Saint John became “anchored” by data, using it to create and test hypotheses for future marketing initiatives and to reverse-engineer successful initiatives to understand why they worked so well.
Throughout this time, Saint John was actually developing and refining her intuition via this laser-focus on marketing data. She began recognizing patterns that would inevitably lead to specific outcomes, and identifying anomalies that allowed her to think more critically about her own thought process and understandings.
The lesson here is to never rely on intuition alone — especially when entering uncharted marketing territory. Instead, use data to form a foundation on which to build your future marketing initiatives and efforts.
In gaining complete control of your marketing data from the get-go, you’ll all but ensure your understanding of your customers is built on solid ground — and will continue to grow stronger as you learn even more about them.
Let Intuition Take Over
Once this foundation is built, though, Saint John believes that intuition needs to take over in order for marketers to reach their true potential.
To paraphrase Bozoma, intuition allows your ideas to take flight. It helps you to take a less linear, more holistic approach, overall. And it enables you to go beyond simply meeting your customers expectations — and to actually exceed them at every touchpoint.
Again, staying too focused on data can actually stunt your thinking, and cause you to operate within self-imposed limitations without even realizing it. If you’re only concerned with the data you have on-hand, thinking outside-the-box might never even come into play.
As Saint John explains, allowing your intuition to take over involves not just having the knowledge and experience to make the right decision — but also trusting in your expertise enough to let it guide you.
Marketing managers and team leads, then, need to double-down when it comes to trusting their employees to make informed suggestions based on their own intuition. This, in turn, will lead to an almost continuous exchange of ideas throughout your team — which can potentially lead to the “A-ha” moments that spur your organization to greatness.
Combine Data and Intuition for Practical Innovation
Toward the end of her Talk, Saint John clarifies that she’s not against data.
She is the CMO of data-loving Netflix, after all.
Rather, she stresses the importance of intertwining data and intuition in order to create something that truly brings value to the world.
If you take what you know to be true, then add new data and information to build on this knowledge and expertise, you’ll almost always be able to come up with something special.
Saint John likens it to preparing a meal for a dinner party: While you do have to take your guests’ preferences into consideration, you’ll need to use your knowledge of cooking to put them all together into a dish worth eating.
Will you always come up with a game-changing, industry-shattering idea when intertwining data and intuition?
Absolutely not — and that’s okay.
Just as there will always be that one person who doesn’t like the meal you made, there will be times when your creative ideas fall flat in front of your audience.
But that doesn’t always mean we were wrong. It doesn’t mean our data was off, or that your intuition was incorrect.
All it means is that you now have both more data and more experience to draw on when looking to the next big thing your team has to offer.