Mallard contends that marketers are compiling large amounts of data with the expectation they can find a strategy within the data. And this is misguided. “I always think of insights as something we use to inform our intuition or to inform an idea, but they can’t tell you what your business needs to become,” Mallard says.
Mallard says that consumers are telling marketers what they want—the outcome they want—but that it is marketers’ jobs to develop the solution. It is not wise to expect the consumer to know what that solution is.
“You should go spear fishing with data. You should not be throwing a net out into the ocean, pulling everything in and hoping your answer is in the net,” she said, according to Marketing Week. “You have to have an idea and then you go in to either disprove your thesis or to enhance your thesis somehow.”