Head, Heart, Gut: A Practical Model for Better Marketing Decisions

Ruth Napier
Aug 18
4 min read

Most marketing decisions get made by one part of you. The rational, data-checking, spreadsheet-scanning part. The other two parts rarely get a seat at the table.

That's a problem, because the best decisions I've seen made, in banking and in law, drew on all three.

Why one brain isn't enough

We talk about intelligence as if it lives entirely in the head. Facts, figures, dashboards, patterns. It's the brain we're trained to trust and the one every appraisal, every board pack and every KPI rewards.

But there are two other centres of intelligence most of us barely use on purpose: the heart and the gut. The heart brain is what makes us social and empathetic. It's the part that cares enough about a decision to prioritise it properly. The gut brain is older and faster. It's your fight or flight instinct, and it's often the first to notice that something is off, long before you can explain why.

Used together, head, heart and gut give you a fuller picture than data alone ever will. Used in isolation, each one has a blind spot.

What each brain is actually good for

It helps to be specific about what each one contributes, rather than treating "trust your gut" as a vague platitude.

Your head is for cognitive perception and pattern recognition. It's where analysis, synthesis and storytelling happen. It's essential, and it's also the brain most professional services people over-rely on, because it's the one that gets rewarded.
Your heart is for social and emotional intelligence. Without it, a decision might be perfectly logical and completely uninspiring. Nobody on your team will fight for a plan they don't feel anything about.
Your gut is for speed and risk. It's the part flagging danger before your head has finished building the business case. Ignore it often enough and you'll find yourself making technically sound decisions that quietly go wrong.

Leadership coach Vicki Brock* puts it well: most of us are trained to feed the head brain facts and figures, and rarely trained to process feelings or listen to instinct in the same disciplined way.

The three brains in practice

I saw this play out for years in banking, where the instinct was to say we relied on data. In truth, we rarely relied on it exclusively. Instincts were trained and honed alongside the numbers, and data was often used to work out why something wouldn't happen just as much as why it would.

A "good" margin in one industry might be 3%, and in another, a "poor" one at 7%. Objective data always needed interpretation. We built models to project the future, but we equally valued an educated guess about how macroeconomic shifts, geopolitics and the behaviour of a management team might interact. Even in a high stakes, numbers-driven world, intuition worked hand in hand with the data. Neither one was allowed to work alone.

How to spot when your brains disagree

The most useful moments aren't when head, heart and gut agree. They're when they don't.

Harvard Business contributor Marcy Farrell** offers three prompts worth borrowing whenever the numbers look fine but something still nags at you.

The data looks good, but you feel anxious. Is your gut sensing a risk the numbers haven't caught yet?
The data contradicts what you expected, and you feel frustrated. Are you resisting letting go of your original hypothesis?
The data is in, and you feel uncomfortable. Is there a reason to distrust the data, or is this decision rooted in something bigger than you first thought?

None of these questions tell you to override the data. They tell you to interrogate the discomfort before you dismiss it.

Why this matters more in professional services

There are particular pressures in law and professional services that push people towards head-only thinking. Billable pressure. The annual reset of budgets and targets to zero. Short deadlines that leave little room for slow deliberation. The partnership model.

That combination can tip a firm into analysis paralysis, where leaders spend more time perfecting a plan than executing it. It can also push people the other way, towards knee-jerk decisions made purely to keep pace with a competitor, without asking whether that competitor's move actually makes sense for your firm.

Both failure modes come from the same root cause. The head brain is doing all the work, and nobody has checked in with the heart or the gut.

Building the habit

You don't need a new framework bolted onto every meeting. You need a few small, repeatable habits.

Notice the overreliance first. Before you can rebalance, you need to know where you sit. Are you the person who always waits for one more data point, or the person who never checks the numbers at all?
Name the discomfort out loud. In a meeting, when something feels wrong despite the data looking right, say so. "The numbers support this, but something's bothering me" is a legitimate contribution, not a weakness.
Protect thinking time. Block time to think, not just to act. This works for individuals and matters even more for teams, who rarely get permission to pause together.
Ask better questions before pulling data. Define what you're actually trying to understand first. If clients are leaving, "why" asked five times in a row will usually get you closer to the truth than another dashboard will.

Making better marketing decisions: The edge isn't in the data

Marketing is as much about creativity as it is about information. Business development is as much about human relationships as it is about numbers on a screen.

Data should inform your thinking. It shouldn't replace it. The value senior marketers bring isn't knowing where to find the numbers. It's knowing what they mean, when to question them, and how to balance them with experience, intuition and commercial judgement.

Next time you reach for a dashboard, pause for a moment first. Ask what the data can't tell you. That's usually where the real answer is sitting.

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