Abstract:

In the past market research has been painted as being ‘detached’ from the decision-making process, while the ‘intuitive’ contributions from management have been billed as more engaged with what business problem solving is all about. This polarisation of the contribution of data and intuition to informed management decision-making has been largely unhelpful. The future clearly lies in developing analysis frameworks that help us blend the best of ‘informed’ intuition, with the rigorous ‘orthodox’ data analysis that market researchers have always provided. This paper reviews what we know about intuition and how we broach business decision-making, prior to exploring the opportunities that exist for more intuitive based inputs from management to sit alongside the more formal evidence in the analysis of market research data.