Are Your Marketing Strategies Driven by Your Gut or Your Head?

Only two out of ten U.S. companies grow organically -- through their marketing efforts and the introduction of new products -- by more than 2 or 3 percent per year. The rest are holding their own or actually declining.

According to top marketing consultants Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg, the reason behind these frustratingly anemic numbers is simple: too many companies rely on a marketing approach that, in today's economic, cultural, and technological climate, is simply obsolete. But they don't have to -- and neither do you. Developments in marketing intelligence technologies enable better, more informed decision making. They lead to the kind of programs that separate true market leaders from also-rans.

In their new marketing book, Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter than Your Head: How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., April 2007), Clancy and Krieg spell out, clearly and persuasively, how conventional "gut-based" marketing contributes not to real success, but to the sluggish pace of innovation and mediocre performance of most American companies today. With real-world examples, the authors show why American businesses must begin to balance creativity and emotion with research and business reality when it comes to developing, planning, and implementing marketing programs.

The "decision making from the gut" school of marketing got a boost from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which suggests that snap judgments and first impressions are often better than decisions made after much research and deliberation. In reality, say Clancy and Krieg, too many marketing executives base major marketing campaigns on intuitions and anecdotes rather than on hard data and solid financial criteria. And it's exactly this kind of behavior that has led to poor targeting, wrongheaded positioning, ineffective advertising, lackluster product performance, give-away-the-store promotions, poorly allocated marketing dollars, and a widening gap between marketing executives and the salespeople who are out in the real world, trying to make the company successful in spite of itself.

Drawing on more than a half century of combined experience in the trenches with some of the best-known, most loved brands in the world, the authors outline a blueprint for fact-based marketing that, unlike pure emotion or any particular individual's "gut instinct," actually works in today's rapidly changing environment. Their step-by-step model is buttressed by new research on pressing marketing issues, corporate examples, intelligence-gathering technologies, best practice lists, diagnostic tools, and end-of-chapter questions that illuminate key marketing issues.

Learn how to:

- give your marketing plan a "performance review"
- accurately identify, refine, and describe your target market
- position your brand as distinct from competitors' brands
- use marketing science to create the most profitable new products and services
- choose media vehicles that provide the best return on investment
- develop well-tested advertising that will produce results
- practice smarter event sponsorship to win customers
- partner with sales to create a synergistic profit machine

The widening role of fact-based marketing is misunderstood in many, perhaps most, organizations. Clancy and Krieg clearly demonstrate in this marketing book how smart, state-of-the-science marketing contributes value to the entire enterprise and can lead companies to greater revenues, profits, and growth than those of their less astute competitors who are still "winging it" by marketing from their gut.

Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg are leading experts on fact-based marketing. They have written and co written several best-selling and award-winning business books, and they speak to corporate audiences worldwide about marketing trends and advances in marketing technologies. They are chairman and president, respectively, of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, a firm whose international clientele includes several Fortune 500 companies. For more information on Copernicus' marketing strategies, please visit the website at http://www.copernicusmarketing.com.

Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter than Your Head
How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth and Profits
Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
April 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-471-97993-7
Hardcover, 284 pages
$29.95