Intuitive Marketing: What Marketers Can Learn from Brain Science

Intuitive Marketing introduces a new theory of marketing that does not rely on overt or covert persuasion and does not require treating consumers as “patsies.”

Traditional marketing assumes its purpose is persuasion: it must grab people’s attention, get them to change their minds, and convince them to do what they didn’t want to do. Marketers compete every day to develop messages that will be noticed, “rise above the clutter,” and achieve “stopping power.”

But to the average consumer, marketing and advertising are becoming overwhelming. From their point of view, it’s all clutter, it’s all annoying, it’s all an imposition on their already overworked conscious minds.

Intuitive marketing is based on a different view of how consumers think, act, and respond to marketing; a view built directly on the latest findings and insights from brain science.

Like traditional marketing, intuitive marketing seeks to influence consumers. But it does so in a radically different way: by aligning with consumers’ existing motivations and goals, primarily in the service of positive psychological needs, rather than by attempting to impose immediate transactional goals on consumers using tactics of disruption, distraction, and persuasion.

Intuitive Marketing demonstrates both the perils of persuasion as a marketing strategy and the promise of intuitive marketing as a better way to build lasting relationships with customers and consumers. It provides a path forward for marketing that treats consumers with respect, earns (rather than demands) attention, aligns with (rather than disrupts) consumer motivations and goals, and recognizes the reality of how consumers think, learn, and choose in the modern marketplace.

"Marketers would do well to take into account the considerable evidence in this book." --ROBERT CIALDINI, author of Influence and Pre-Suasion

"I recommend you buy several different packets of excitingly colored Post-It Notes to accompany this book, as you will read it once and then refer to it one hundred times more." --RORY SUTHERLAND, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy, author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas that Don't Make Sense

"This is a very interesting, useful, and wise book. I look forward to plundering it deeply." --LES BINET, co-author of The Long and the Short of It, Head of Effectiveness, Adam & Eve DDB

"With his new book, Steve Genco will challenge the way you think about marketing and challenge you to be better at your craft." --NIR EYAL, author of Hooked and Indistractable

"A compelling read that I have recommended to both my academic and commercial colleagues." --KIMBERLY ROSE CLARK, PhD, Lecturer & Researcher, Dartmouth College Department of Psychological & Brain Science, Co-Founder, Chief Research Officer of Merchant Mechanics