Intuition is not strategy: a better way to make marketing decisions

The problem is not intuition. It is when intuition becomes the final answer

Small business owners often understand their businesses in ways a dashboard never fully can. They talk to customers, see what sells, notice patterns, and build knowledge through years of experience. That knowledge matters. Research on SME marketing has found that tacit knowledge, local relationships, and intuitive judgment can create real advantages for smaller businesses.

The risk starts when experience becomes certainty. Research by Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein found that good intuition depends on an environment with patterns that can actually be learned and enough feedback to learn them. Feeling confident is not the same as being right. A 2024 study of 206 Brazilian micro, small, and medium-sized businesses adds an interesting marketing perspective. Intuitive decision-making did not show a significant effect in the study, while more rational decision styles were connected to stronger strategy creativity and implementation, which in turn supported performance.

Copying a competitor is not the same as learning from the market

Another common shortcut is watching a competitor do something that appears successful and deciding to repeat it. Maybe they are growing on Instagram, offering a certain promotion, or investing heavily in one channel. What you can see is the action. What you usually cannot see is the audience strategy, margins, acquisition cost, positioning, resources, or how that action fits into the rest of the business.

Competitor research still matters. The difference is between learning and copying. A meta-analysis covering 23 independent samples and more than 66,000 firms found that the impact of imitation changes depending on the business environment. The benefits also tended to be stronger in the short term than over the long term. A competitor can give you useful clues, but their strategy is not automatically a blueprint for yours.

Turn instinct into learning

• Intuition: “I think this could work.”
• Hypothesis: “We believe this action could create this result for this customer.”
• Evidence: “What do we already know about the customer, market, and business?”
• Test: “What is the smallest useful way to try it?”
• Learn: “What actually happened?”
• Decide: “Keep it, change it, or stop it?”

Strategy does not remove instinct. It gives it a better process

A marketing strategy does not need to be a 50-page document. For a small business, it can start with a few clear choices: what business problem marketing needs to help solve, which customers matter most, why they should choose you, what role each channel should play, and what you will measure. The goal is not to remove the owner's experience. It is to stop experience from becoming the only evidence behind a decision.

Research suggests these two ways of thinking can work together. A study of small businesses given access to more structured customer data found that the information brought greater precision and structure to marketing planning. It did not replace the owners' intuitive understanding of their markets. It complemented it. That is a useful model for small businesses: use experience to identify possibilities, then use evidence to decide which possibilities deserve more investment.

“Intuition can point to a direction. Strategy turns that direction into a choice that can be tested, learned from, and improved.”
Diego Gomes, add2go