Consumer research has a design flaw that the industry doesn't talk about enough.

It is built, almost entirely, on asking people what they would do — in conditions carefully designed to remove the friction, cost, and competing alternatives that define every real purchase decision.

A respondent in a concept test is not a consumer in a supermarket aisle. They are not choosing between your product and the three alternatives that are already in their basket. They are not weighing your launch price against a trusted brand they've bought for years. They have nothing at stake. No card to tap. No real decision to make.

In those conditions, people are broadly positive. They are helpful. They express interest in things they will never buy. They score purchase intent at levels that bear no meaningful relationship to what will happen at the till.

This isn't a criticism of research practitioners.

The tools are sophisticated, the methodologies well-developed, and the people who run them often highly skilled. The problem is more fundamental: it's not possible to accurately measure purchase behaviour without a purchase decision. And survey environments, by definition, don't have one.

The industry knows this. Stated preference versus revealed preference is not a new debate.

Behavioural economics has been making the case for decades that what people say and what they do diverge systematically and predictably. The academic evidence is overwhelming.

And yet the dominant form of consumer research in new product development remains the concept test — which measures stated preference, in a controlled environment, with nothing at stake.

Why? Partly because it is relatively cheap and fast. Partly because it produces the kind of clear, quantified output that organisations can act on. And partly, perhaps, because it tends to produce positive results — which makes it easier to build the internal confidence needed to move a concept forward.

But positive results from conditions that aren't real are not evidence of commercial viability. They're evidence that the concept doesn't actively repel people in a vacuum. That's a low bar, and it's not the bar that matters.

The bar that matters is whether real consumers, confronted with real choices, will choose your product. And the only way to get close to that answer before launch is to put real creative in front of real audiences and measure what they actually do.

Not what they say they'll do. What they do.