Horn Vs Headlights

After posting the blog titled Difference between BI and ERP reports couple of days ago, I got a lot of emails and messages. Some of them were appreciating, some were asking more details which i will cover in next posts. But one question which got more attention came from a marketing guy who asked me that shouldn't it be more reasonable for companies to spend in marketing/advertisement instead of business intelligence at this financial crisis time to get more business?

Well, every body has his/her own point of view on this but my opinion is that advertising is like a Car Horn which sounds loudly and draws the attention of people towards the car (or your business) whereas business intelligence is like a car's headlight which shows you that if you are on track or not and what is in front of you. (There are a lot of other things in a car which could be referred as BI, say, car's dashboard, windscreen etc but in this example, headlight fits appropriately :) ).

So what do you think. At the time of this economic & financial crisis when you are driving your business in dark and you don't exactly know what is going to happen, what do you need? Horn or Headlights ?