Customer Reviews

Your Gut is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head : How Disciplined, Fact-Based Marketing Can Drive Extraordinary Growth & Profits

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Clancy and Krieg provide help to all those non-marketing executives who need to formulate intelligent, probing questions for their marketing gurus. Did you ever wonder about those ads where you can't understand what product is being promoted? How can those ads generate new sales? They don't! The book describes the root causes of under-achieving marketing programs and how to measure an ROI for your AD budget. It helps you understand how to identify your most profitable target market and how to effectively position your product or service.
It is an informative and back to basics approach to effective marketing.

Too often marketing decisions are made in a "blink"--based on a hunch or a feeling about the product/market/demand/advertising/what-have-you. This book offers an antidote to "blink" marketing: be systematic, gather/interpret data, plan carefully, measure/evaluate results, track performance over time, and apply lessons learned to continuously improve.

I particularly like the diagram on p. 268, where Clancy and Krieg show how to think through the effect of every marketing element on customer response (awareness, understanding, perceptions, preferences, behavior, loyalty). This diagram alone is worth the price of the book because it demonstrates the connections between marketing activities and the need to research what drives your customers' responses.

A book that debunks the silly theory that marketing decision-making is best made with the gut, as opposed to the proper use of fact-based marketing, based primarily on experimentation, has been long overdue! In this book, Clancy and Krieg achieve this and a lot more! As in their other books, they go out of their way to use real-world examples to illustrate the points they make. In addition, the presentation of the material discussed in the book is remarkable. It makes the material in the book extremely accessible to virtually any interested reader. While it certainly is not the case that a reading of this book, without other training, will allow someone to be a producer of a cogent marketing research study, what this book does do, is allow a reader to be a user of marketing research - that is, be able to evaluate whether the study has addressed the right issues (e.g., targeting and positioning), and has been done properly! What the book also does is to present to the reader what the important elements of marketing are, and why - and what can happen if these important elements are ignored. Actually, the examples in the book suggest (perhaps sadly so) that it is not only the "novices," but folks at all levels of the marketing decision-making hierarchy who can and will benefit from reading this book. I'm a guy who is pretty knowledgeable about most of the ideas in this book; and, I was familiar with many of the examples cited in the book. Nevertheless, I still learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the book. I believe that anyone, with any interest at all in marketing, or indeed in any even remotely-related field, will receive both knowledge and enjoyment from reading this book. (Can there be a better combination to receive from a book than both knowledge and enjoyment?)

It's a reasoned response to by Malcolm Gladwell's Blink and similar "your gut reaction is best" books, and highlights the critical importance of scientific research for good marketing and advertising purchase decisions. Sure, the authors' views continue the research views of David Ogilvy's "Confessions of an Advertising Man," etc., but does so with current anecdotes. Clancy and Krieg's personal writing style highlight inside stories about their personal sale effort frustrations. This books conclusions promote a thoughtful approach to products and their promotion, a welcome contrast to seat-of-the-pants youthful decision making.

This book makes us pay attention to the science of marketing, more critical than ever to succeed in marketing. "How to give your marketing programs a performance review" is an especially valuable and enlightening chapter. And the research on product commoditization is chilling, fascinating and in many ways a wake up call. Read this before your CEO does.

I had the opportunity to meet Kevin Clancy when he came and gave a guest lecture to my Strategic Marketing class in Business School. I bought the book about 15 minutes after his presentation. Mr. Clancy blew away a class of about 30 people with his unique presentation and knowledge of marketing, based on his extensive experience.

The book picked up right where his presentation left off, offering simple and effective advice for anyone in the field of marketing. Too often marketers try and "hit a homerun" and win awards with their advertising campaigns, but they forget the whole premise of what they do, which is to raise awareness about their product or service. It seems that every day I see an ad on TV that I have seen many times before, but yet I still don't know what product is being advertised until the end of the ad. Mr. Clancy teaches you the best way to create marketing that will produce tangible results, based on facts and solid research as opposed to gut feelings.

YOUR GUT IS STILL NOT SMARTER THAN YOUR HEAD: HOW DISCIPLINED, FACT-BASED MARKETING CAN DRIVE EXTRAORDINARY GROWTH AND PROFITS considers and refutes one of the basics of marketing: the idea of the 'gut instinct' driving innovation. Marketing consultants Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg here explain how to consider more disciplined, accountable marketing approaches that quantify the 'gut instinct' with measurable facts and analytical tools. Case studies and real-world data blend in a survey of how disciplined marketing beats gut-only thinking and planning, making this a pick for any collection catering to managers.

Excellent book, sharing tons of interesting and useful business information, written with wits, spirit and humor.

Authors Clancy and Krieg continue to be the sirens of reason in a sea of marketing strategies and tactics that are drowning in ineffectiveness. If you haven't purchased any of their previous books and are looking for a clear and well-written treatise on why most marketing efforts fail and what you can do to avoid the same fate, then this book is for you. It's an easy read, but also thought-provoking. CEOs should be especially interested, especially if they intend to hold their marketing staffs accountable for results. If I have a quibble (and it's minor), it's that not enough time and attention is paid to online marketing, which has its own share of marketing charlatans but is also on the cutting edge of performance measurement as a result of tools like Google Analytics. All in all -- a valuable resource for any business library.

This book is a must have for all marketers. It challenges conventional teaching by introducing key theories of branding and marketing in real time.

Dr. Jamie Pleasant