The Intuition Deficit: 7 Ways Marketing Can Lose Its Way in Data

No matter who’s reading, I’m going to go out on a limb and say: Your marketing has never been more forgettable.

Before you reflexively protest, take a breath: Odds are you agree to some extent. Indeed, it may be bumming you out every day that you’re not doing the kind of toe-curling marketing you imagined when you did your case study for this job.

Our industry's obsession with measurability has produced marketing teams that can optimize anything but struggle to create anything worth optimizing. They know exactly how many people clicked on something but also couldn’t tell you if anybody actually gave a shit about what they clicked on.

This doesn’t make you a bad marketer. We all built this monster. But now, we face the consequences: Marketing that may hit its KPI while missing the only metric that truly matters—making people feel something.

There’s Safety in Measurability. But Is There Greatness?

I get it. Data feels safe. We can point to numbers when the CMO, CEO, or Board questions our decisions. And it’s been fetishized at most orgs so that those who can wield it are considered the MVPs of any team.

Meanwhile, behind doors, we all bemoan the state of our data. Most data is incredibly gapped. Most companies' data infrastructure is bogged down with technical debt, many important events aren’t captured or tracked, and dashboards break all the time.

Moreover, the tail is wagging the proverbial dog. Instead of using data to make decisions, we’ve started letting the data make our decisions for us. That means marketing is often missing something important (and, yeah, I’m going to say that something important is what can make your marketing interesting again): Intuition. The ability to sense what will resonate before the data confirms it. The courage to bet on an idea that feels right despite the lack of historical metrics.

7 Ways Marketing Can Lose Its Way in Data

Here are seven ways marketers sacrifice effectiveness at the altar of measurability:

1. The QBR Hostage Situation

The mistake: Rejecting any initiative that can't demonstrate ROI within the current quarter.

What it misses: 

• Marketing teams addicted to quarterly ROI metrics may unknowingly create their own expiration date. 
• Because the most valuable marketing assets are precisely those that can't be built in a quarter: Brand recognition, audience trust, and cultural relevance. 
• By the time these show up in your attribution model, it's too late to catch up.

2. The Attribution Obsession

The mistake: Letting flawed attribution models dictate your entire marketing strategy.

What it misses: 

• A customer discovers you through word of mouth, reads your thought leadership for months, and finally clicks a retargeting ad to purchase. Your attribution model gives 100% credit to that last ad.
• In response, your team doubles down on retargeting while quietly defunding the very activities that made it effective. Soon, you're aggressively retargeting an audience that no longer exists.

3. The Content/Creative Quality Collapse

The mistake: Prioritizing volume and views over originality and impact.

What it misses: 

• The pressure for ‘more’ creates an ecosystem where marketers chase topics based on search volume alone, instead of having something distinctive to say. They ‘feed the machine’ rather than sincerely serving their readers’ needs. 
• Quality content starts to look too expensive and time-consuming, and everybody’s forgotten how to make it anyway.
• Instead of AI content becoming a much-needed and timely quality reset, it’s chased with the same ‘hack the algorithm’ mindset.

4. The Channel Myopia

The mistake: Over-investing in easily measured channels while neglecting powerful but messy ones.

What it misses: 

• Many of the most impactful marketing moments happen elsewhere: Word-of-mouth conversations, podcast mentions, industry events, physical spaces, and above-the-line brand campaigns.
• When your strategy is dictated by what you can measure rather than what actually moves your market, you end up optimizing a fraction of the customer experience while ignoring other forces that also drive decisions.

5. The Testing Treadmill

The mistake: A/B testing minor variables while shying away from bolder brand and positioning changes.

What it misses: 

• The really valuable tests aren't incremental tweaks—they're bold experiments that challenge fundamental assumptions about what your market truly values.
• A/B testing has its place. But often, spending months testing button colours and headline variations means you’re testing crap against slightly better crap, while failing to address the core issues that could actually deliver meaningful growth.

6. The Benchmark Blinkers

The mistake: Obsessing over industry benchmarks and competitive metrics rather than understanding your unique market dynamics.

What it misses: 

• Benchmarks are average performance metrics from average companies making average decisions. They're inherently backward-looking and, by definition, unremarkable.
• The most transformative marketing rarely fits neatly into benchmark comparisons. 
• Breakthroughs come from teams that understand a fundamental truth: You don't create extraordinary results by optimizing for average performance.

7. The Talent Trap

The mistake: Hiring practices that overemphasize technical and analytical skills while undervaluing market intuition and creativity.

What it misses: 

• The pattern recognition, creative leaps, and human insight that data alone can't provide.
• Marketing departments being staffed with channel wizards—brilliant individuals who are talented at optimizing and measuring individual channels. 
• But gapped on understanding the warp and weft of marketing channels. Missing what makes audiences tick. Lacking instinct for great stories, taste, and the right kind of daring.

How We Got Here: The Rise of the Metrics-Obsessed Marketing Culture

The path to our current predicament was paved with good intentions. Digital marketing promised unprecedented measurability after decades of fluffy unmeasurability. Early wins from optimization created a feedback loop that reinforced our data addiction. Marketing got a profound makeover: From cost centre to revenue generator.

Soon, marketing departments restructured themselves around what they could measure rather than what they should create. Leaders demanded "data-driven decisions" without acknowledging that data can only tell us what happened yesterday, not what will resonate tomorrow.

Marketing leadership has transformed from Chief Marketing Officers into Chief Metrics Officers. We've systematically rewarded channel wizardry over market intuition. We've promoted based on spreadsheet proficiency rather than customer understanding. We've created environments where "I think" became a dirty phrase, replaced by the seemingly unassailable "the data shows."

AI Creates a 'Moment to Choose'

AI creates a fork in the road. Approaching AI with the same performance mindset feels wrong on so many levels. This isn’t the newest algorithm to ‘hack’. It’s far too fluid and personalized for that. This isn’t a new kind of search engine any more than the internet was a new kind of publication. It’s a fundamentally different beast. It will change us for better and worse in ways we can’t even predict yet.

It’s also making the optimization mindset we’ve toiled so table stakes it’s almost not worth talking about anymore. In the past, whole teams and projects would rise and fall on their ability to optimize metadescriptions or crank out sub-par grey goo content. Now with AI, those jobs are so much easier, they’ll eventually become non-jobs. 

But if you go back to that niggling voice you’ll find there’s so much value still to chase. We can work with AI, bringing something unique to the table, and moving back to great marketing. Or we can use AI to compound the problem and end up with exponentially more grey goo. 

This is an important moment to decide what marketing can look like. AI could be a powerful tool to create room for intuition to come back to the table. Or it could be used to propel us further and faster down the grey goo path. 

Breaking Free from the Data Dependency Trap

If you’re still reading, I’m assuming you’re interested in the alternative. We become better marketers, balancing intuition and data, making bold calls while keeping an eye on what the data tells us. 

To be crystal clear: The suggestion here isn’t to abandon data. It is to also hone your marketing team’s intuition. Here are some of the ways you can start to do that.

• Reward deep market understanding, not just channel expertise
• Build teams with diverse skills beyond technical optimization
• Know when to lead with data and when to lead with intuition
• Finesse your taste through exposure to great marketing
• Create safety for ideas that can't be immediately validated
• Remember that measurability does not always equal impact