What’s happened to our guts?

Why are we dedicating entire bathroom drawers and kitchen cupboards to gut health, but in business life, we are abandoning our gut at an alarming rate?

Rebecca Stambanis is a strategy partner at Special Group Australia

Guts are all the rage right now. Type the word “gut” into Amazon and you will receive more than 30,000 gut-related items – gut muesli, gut cookbooks, gut pills, gut repairs, gut cleanses, gut hacks.

It would seem that looking after our physical gut has become pretty darn important. But what about our figurative gut?

At home, we are dedicating entire bathroom drawers and kitchen cupboards to our gut health, but in our business life, we are abandoning our gut at an alarming rate and it’s killing us creatively.

I don’t wish to muddy the waters here.

When I talk about using our gut, I’m referring to well-fed instincts … that persistent, nurturing niggle inside all of us that reveals itself when something intuitively feels right or worth a shot.

Type the word “gut” into Amazon and you will receive overmore than 30,000 gut-related items – gut muesli, gut cookbooks, gut pills, gut repairs, gut cleanses, gut hacks.

Or far more importantly, when something doesn’t – when it feels uncomfortable, expected, banal, too familiar, contrived, dishonest, misguided, irrelevant, cringey or just plain wrong. It’s that critical point when we are able to ask ourselves – why does this matter? Why will people care? What are we, this brand, this product, this idea, this moment, truly in service of?

What I am not talking about is hiding behind our gut to make ill-informed assumptions based solely on our own personal experience, bias or individual preference.

Gut instinct isn’t narcissistic and it does not replace empathy, understanding and talking with, and learning from, real people in the real world.

Quite the contrary.

What our gut teaches us is to interrogate and question what is laid in front of us and to dig deeper for the answers.

It calls for us to be more investigative journalist, less salesman. And this is increasingly important in an environment where data and market research is dominating our creative conversations. An industry worth more than $US75bn globally, research and insight specialists have done a good job building a well-oiled machine primed to ask questions that matter to marketers but not necessarily to the people they are intended to serve. And in doing so, we have let our creative instincts become overshadowed by marketing theory and reason. We have been spooked.

“The truth is our gut instinct isn’t perfect”.Image from Bio-Kult's Instagram page

It’s what seduces us to think too much and create too little. And it’s why, more often than not, audiences can see through the calculated, stage-managed marketing that businesses are putting out into the world, and why they are becoming increasingly distrusting and disengaged in what brands have to say. Over the last few decades, there have been a myriad of publications reminding us how the world has become more complex and decisions are harder and we can no longer rely on our gut as it will only lead us astray.

“Trust the data,” they say. They want us to believe that somehow our gut instinct is a mystical notion, that we are blindly laying our faith into a soft, cushiony pillow that has no real substance and that when the stakes are high, our gut is inadequate.

But to diminish our intuition as whimsical fancy is a mistake. It’s often our gut that gives us the space to experiment, to challenge, to take leaps, to try, and importantly, to fail. Because the truth is our gut instinct isn’t perfect.

For every good impulse our collective guts have given us, they have given us a dodgy one.

We all know those times we got it wrong. But isn’t that the point?

Our gut is a muscle that needs to be exercised, put to work and nurtured in order to be useful. The more we use it, the more we sense it, the better it becomes.

Like an elite athlete, meticulous surgeon or defiant parent, our instincts are sharper the more we listen and learn from them – it’s part instinct, but also part skill, experience and training. Yet, if we continue to rely solely on data to show us the way forward, then our instincts become blunt, and our gut sluggish and lazy.

Naturally, there is a big role for data and research in helping us make good business decisions. I’m not denying that. But it relies on how we design it, when we draw on it, what we do with it and fundamentally, how our gut reacts to it.

Ms Stambanis’ mentor and friend; Jeff Goodby, co-chairman and partner at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, a full-service advertising agency in San Francisco.

As I was taught very early on with Nike ... “If you ask a kid what he wants in a cake, and then make the cake for that kid, what you will end up with is a cake made entirely of icing. And not only will the kid not like the cake, it will probably make him vomit”.

It’s not the data that makes the difference. Because the truth is that most companies are accessing the same information as their competitors. As my dear friend and mentor, Jeff Goodby (co-founder of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners ad agency), always says “it’s what happens after that that makes the difference”.

That’s where our creative instinct kicks in and our gut wakes up. Listen to that rumble. It’s a beautiful sound.

Rebecca Stambanis is a strategy partner at Special Group Australia