We have gut feelings, instincts, and intuition for a reason.
Often those reasons are sound — even if we can’t articulate them. But sometimes the reasons are rubbish.
Inconvenient as it may be, as single notes in the chorus of earth’s 7.6 billion, our intuition is not primordial, perfect, or universal.
Intuition is useful to the extent that it is grounded in interpretation — and iterative.
When it comes to marketing, there is a myriad of ways to test intuition, mostly with data.
It’s often about aggregation, spotting trends, and ‘significance’, but if you need to test your intuition and gain the empathy required to act — there is nothing quite like talking to a customer yourself*.
Truthfully it is not always what I feel like doing — when a call has to be at 6am due to timezones, or I am jetlagged to the point of falling over at a conference, or feeling introverted — but it’s always worth it.
From enterprise store builders to store managers to business owners — hearing a customer tell me in their own words what it’s like to use WooCommerce is priceless.
Because it doesn’t just test my intuition: it forms it.
* A word of caution is that anecdotes can be unhelpful if given too much weight, or used in isolation. Keep in mind when you talk to a customer that they are just that: one customer.
Automattic Design 