Your instinct is only as good as the market it was trained on

"Trust your gut."

Experienced marketers hear it all the time, and often they should. Their gut is years of watching what works, compressed into a feeling. It's right more often than the data suggests.

It's also why they're confidently wrong when the context changes.

What the advice leaves out

A marketer's instinct isn't magic. It's patterns: campaigns that landed, buyers who said yes, messages that fell flat, prices that held. In the context where those patterns were learned, it's faster than any dashboard.

The problem is that it doesn't know where it was learned. No instinct says "this only holds for consumer brands" or "this worked because we had a sales team of forty". The pattern arrives as certainty, without its conditions attached.

So when the market changes, instinct doesn't switch off. It keeps firing with the same confidence. A message built on emotion and reach meets a B2B deal with six people signing off. An enterprise playbook of events and long nurture meets a seed-stage company with twelve months of runway. A tone that read as confident in one country reads as arrogant in the next.

The marketer isn't careless. Their experience is real. It's from somewhere else.

Trust it according to where it was trained

When you start in a new company, market or stage, sort what your gut tells you into three groups.

Trained here. You've sold to this buyer, at this price, through this kind of sales motion. Trust it and move fast.

Trained nearby. Similar, but one thing is different: deal size, buyer, stage or market. Treat it as a hypothesis, and decide what would prove it wrong before you test it.

Trained elsewhere. A different buyer or motion entirely. Assume it's wrong until customers tell you otherwise.

The second group is where most expensive mistakes happen. It feels like the first.

Louder had worked before

A senior marketer I worked with was certain a launch campaign in a new country was too cautious. Her instinct was to make the brand louder: stronger claims, more emotional creative, broader reach. In her previous market, campaigns that created attention first and explained the product later had consistently opened the door to sales.

The campaign got attention. People clicked, watched and engaged. But the conversations that followed were thin. Prospects wanted more proof before they'd talk seriously, and some questioned claims that had felt perfectly normal in the old market.

Her instinct had been trained where the brand was familiar, the category was well understood and buyers would take a first step on reputation. The new market had none of those conditions.

Not everything transferred badly. Her eye for strong creative and weak propositions held up. What didn't transfer was the assumption that attention could carry a buyer through the unfamiliar parts of the decision. The campaign changed: a narrower audience, more context, stronger proof.

Her instinct hadn't failed. It had answered a question from the old market.

When the instinct is early

An instinct can also be trained in the right place and still get dismissed, because it arrives before the evidence.

"What does that mean for the numbers?"

A Head of Marketing I worked with heard that question in almost every leadership meeting. She noticed patterns before they showed up anywhere else: a change in the language customers used, a repeated workaround, a question that kept coming up in different conversations. She'd raise them. Someone would ask what it meant for the numbers, or what she actually wanted them to do about it.

After a while, she started second-guessing whether a pattern was real enough to mention.

I recognised it. Earlier in my career, it happened to me more than once. I'd sense that something in a campaign or a team was off, say so, and have it dismissed. It took me years to realise that much of what I'd sensed had been early rather than wrong. In the moment, the two look exactly the same.

Scepticism about a feeling is reasonable. Dismissing it without checking is where the room goes wrong.

Turn the instinct into a test

Whether an instinct was trained nearby or arrived early, the fix is the same. The leaders who get heard translate their intuition: "Here's what I'm sensing. Here's how it might show up in the numbers. Here's one small test we could run."

That moves the conversation from trusting a feeling to checking it, cheaply. If you're right, you're early and credible. If you're wrong, you've lost a small test and kept your reputation.

Be specific. "Three customers mentioned the same workaround this month" gets further than "something feels off".

Connect it to a number someone already cares about.

Say what would change your mind. It shows you're testing, not insisting.

Find enough support to run the test. You don't need everyone to agree first.

That's what we worked on with the Head of Marketing: making her instincts testable. One pattern she kept noticing was customers asking the same questions during onboarding. Instead of treating it as anecdotal feedback, the team looked at where those questions appeared and found a matching drop-off at the same stage of the onboarding journey. They simplified that step and changed the supporting messaging, and the drop-off fell.

It didn't prove every instinct she had was right. But over time her observations carried more weight, because the leadership team had learned she could explain what she was seeing, what evidence would support it and how to test it without betting the company on a hunch.

Listen for the tell

"In my experience, this always works" is a useful sentence. It needs one follow-up question: where did it work, and what was true there that isn't true here?

If you're a founder hiring senior marketing help, ask the same thing in the interview. Experience is the reason to hire someone. Where it was earned decides how much of it transfers.