21.04.2023
The question of appropriate decision-making
As the organiser, how would you rate the success of your trade fair? Is your assessment based on a gut feeling when you walk through a well-filled exhibition hall at time X and get positive feedback from long-standing exhibitors? Or do you use all the data you evaluate via a participant registration, a satisfaction survey or interactions on your homepage and compare it over several years?
But what does data-based decision-making actually mean? We all know this phenomenon from everyday life. Already in the morning, the best rated, most read or most suitable news for our user behaviour are suggested to us on the smartphone. Throughout the day, our SmartWatch gives us information about our fitness status, for example that today’s step goal still needs to be achieved. Netflix and Amazon Prime suggest films and series in the evening that match our user behaviour and interests exactly. All these recommendations are ultimately based on data. It is therefore not surprising that more and more companies want to collect data in order to draw conclusions for their own business success.
In turn, however, the question also arises as to whether data-based decision-making is really the secret to success, or whether we should rather rely on our intuition? Because intuition is not a sixth sense or some supernatural ability – intuition is primarily based on experience gathered over years. Decisions often have to be made under time pressure, so that the relevant data cannot always be analysed first. And what do our decisions look like when we simply combine data and intuition? Is this ultimately the key to success?
How should we measure the success of our events in the future? Are we right with our gut feeling and feedback conversations? Or is it worthwhile to take a closer look at some of the data collected, evaluate it and make recommendations for action?