Sie navigieren im Merchandising zwischen Intuition und Daten. Wie finden Sie die perfekte Balance?

I believe the perfect balance between intuition and data comes from understanding the limitations of both: When only taking decisions based on intuition, you may end up making subjective decisions or missing out on data that would help you minimize the risk to be wrong when making an important choice or tradeoff. When deciding based on data alone, the direction you take will lack innovation due to your insights being mostly backward-looking, you will take less risks and therefore become safe, perhaps even boring. Appreciating the danger of both extremes will help you to give equal weight to quantitative insights and soundbites or gut feelings, and finding a balance between the two.

Intuition and data are two complementary elements in decision-making. Data is essential for extracting objective and factual information. However, without contextualizing this information, we may end up making undesirable choices. This is where intuition comes in to enrich the thought process. For example, if we analyze a store's sales data without considering that it was understaffed, the weather was bad at the time, or the best selling product had quality issues, we might draw false conclusions. Human reprocessing is an essential phase in decision-making.