“The only real valuable thing is intuition” – Albert Einstein

Today I talk about a topic very close to my heart – Intuition.

“I don’t know where it comes from, but its there” is how most intuitive people would describe this characteristic.

More often than not you find such people in creative fields like advertising, content creation, films, art, photography, etc. These are the guys who have a sense of what would be appealing (visually, phonetically, and aurally) to a majority of people. They can look at something and just know what needs to be done to make it more appealing.

Intuition is a funny thing. Most people think its abstract and that you either have it or you don’t. In fact the Myers Briggs Personality Types actually places ‘intuitive’ at the opposite end of ‘sensing’ personality types, suggesting an inverse relationship between intuition and sense! This is because intuition by definition is abstract.

I have always felt that Intuition doesn’t come from the heavens…but it’s just a subconscious process of deduction made possible through an assimilation of a variety of facts, ideas, philosophies and experiences. Somehow through some unexplained process, when bits and pieces of such subconscious thoughts come together to form a definitive conclusion it can be called intuition. Robert Graves puts it aptly when he says, “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.”

The biggest convincing factor about intuition is that it comes from experience; of a behaviour, a need or an action. Most consumer behaviour is also a result of an assimilation of experiences about the product through a variety of interactions with the brand. The last mile of actual ‘action’ or the ‘impulse’ is where intuition plays a major role.

The role of a marketer is to map the various experiences the consumers have with their brands, use their intuitions about these experiences to develop a product mix strategy and keep evolving through a feedback mechanism / research which tracks these experiences.

If a marketer can understand the role intuition plays in making the final decision to buy or not buy a product, i.e. the last link of the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire > ACTION) model he would have solved a major marketing puzzle.

Ni.

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