Damian Rezaee

Every agency deck has a slide titled “Key Consumer Insight.” It sits there, bolded, underlined, and treated like scripture. It is a single sentence that supposedly explains why a human being will buy a product. Marketers build entire campaigns on top of that one sentence. Boards approve budgets because of that one sentence.

But here is the uncomfortable question nobody asks in the meeting: Does that insight actually exist, or did we just need it to exist so the work could move forward?

The Comfort of a Fixed Truth

Insight work promises something marketing desperately wants: certainty. A stable, nameable truth about a person that will hold still long enough to build a brand strategy on top of it.

“She wants to feel in control.”

“He buys premium products to signal status.”

“Parents fear inadequacy more than they fear cost.”

Neat. Quotable. Slide-ready.

The problem is that human beings are not neat. We are not slide-ready. A person can go to sleep craving comfort and wake up craving control. They can swear off impulse spending at 11 p.m. and buy a $200 jacket at 9 a.m., not necessarily because the earlier insight was false, but because preferences can shift with context, psychological distance, and temporary emotional or physical states (Loewenstein, 2005; Loewenstein et al., 2003; Trope & Liberman, 2010).

This is not merely poetic exaggeration. It is broadly consistent with research showing that human judgments and preferences can change across situations and states.

The Self Is Not One Thing

Behavioural science has spent decades challenging the idea of a completely unified and consistent consumer self. Start with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s distinction, discussed in Thinking, Fast and Slow, between the experiencing self and the remembering self.

The experiencing self is the one living inside a moment, asking, “Does it hurt now?” or “Do I want this now?” The remembering self is the one asked later to summarize the experience. Retrospective evaluations can be influenced heavily by the most intense point of an experience and by how the experience ended, while giving less weight to its total duration.

These are not literally two separate people. Rather, they represent two different ways of evaluating the same experience, and those evaluations can produce different conclusions. Kahneman (2011) argues that the remembering self has a particularly strong influence over the stories people later tell and the decisions they make about repeating an experience.

Now add what George Loewenstein, the Carnegie Mellon economist who pioneered research on visceral states, calls the hot-cold empathy gap. This research suggests that people are often poor at predicting how a hot state, such as hunger, craving, anger, arousal, or fear, will change what they want. Once that state has passed, they may also underestimate how strongly it affected them.

A person deciding tonight what they will order for lunch tomorrow may be making that decision in a relatively cold and rational state. The person who actually orders lunch tomorrow may be experiencing hunger, time pressure, and the emotional effects of the morning. The person is not necessarily lying in either situation. Different states can produce different, equally sincere answers to the same question.

Projection-bias research supports a similar conclusion. People often assume that their future preferences will resemble their present preferences more closely than they actually will, making it difficult to predict how future states will affect their choices (Loewenstein et al., 2003).

Layer in construal-level theory, developed by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, and the picture becomes messier still. Their research demonstrates that people tend to represent psychologically distant decisions in more abstract terms and psychologically near decisions in more concrete terms.

A consumer planning next month’s grocery budget may think in terms of broad values such as health, discipline, and savings. The same consumer standing in the snack aisle shortly before dinner may focus more strongly on immediate details, feasibility, hunger, and gratification. Psychological distance changes how the decision is mentally represented, even when the general decision appears to be the same (Trope & Liberman, 2010).

Mood, hunger, fatigue, social context, and recent comparison points can all reshape what a person wants at the moment they are asked. Ask the same person the same question twice in one day, once in a cold state and once in a hot state, and research suggests that two different but honest answers are possible (Loewenstein, 2005; Loewenstein et al., 2003).

So when an insight report says, “The consumer wants X,” it is rarely lying. It may simply be freezing a single frame from a film that never stops moving and presenting that freeze-frame as the whole story.

Then Why Does It Work Sometimes?

This is where the cynicism needs a limit, because brands built on so-called insights do sometimes succeed repeatedly, across markets and decades. The explanation may not be that the insight captured an eternal truth about the consumer’s soul. It may be that good insight work captures a recurring pattern or tension rather than a permanently fixed desire.

People can be inconsistent in their daily wants. However, research associated with the Ehrenberg-Bass tradition, as summarized for practitioners by Sharp (2010), suggests that consumers commonly buy from a repertoire of competing brands rather than remaining exclusively loyal to one brand.

Sharp describes many consumers as “promiscuous loyals,” meaning buyers who display some repeat purchasing but also regularly purchase competing brands within the same category. For example, a consumer who buys Coca-Cola may also buy Pepsi rather than demonstrating complete loyalty to only one soft-drink brand.

Sharp’s discussion of the law of buyer moderation also suggests that unusually heavy buyers of a brand in one period often purchase less in a later period, while unusually light buyers may purchase more. Individual purchasing levels can therefore change substantially without requiring an equally dramatic change in attitudes toward the brand.

None of this necessarily looks like deep personal conviction. It looks more like what we might expect when immediate choices vary while broader habits and category-level purchasing patterns remain more stable.

Therefore, the insight that survives may not be a sentence about what one person secretly and permanently wants. It may be a sentence about a recurring tension that many people in a category experience, even while their moment-to-moment cravings and brand choices continue to change.

What This Means for How Insight Should Be Used

If insight is a snapshot of a tension rather than a fixed truth about desire, then the way many organizations use it may be backwards.

Stop Treating Insight as a Discovery. Treat It as a Hypothesis With an Expiry Date.

The moment a brand starts speaking about its insight in the past tense, as something permanently found and filed, it risks overstating the stability of its evidence. People and contexts change. The underlying tension might remain relevant, but the specific desire surrounding it should be tested repeatedly.

Separate the Desire From the Tension Underneath It.

“Consumers want convenience” is a statement of desire, and its relevance may change depending on mood, time pressure, physical state, and context (Loewenstein, 2005; Trope & Liberman, 2010).

“Consumers feel guilty about not having enough time for the people they love” is a proposed tension. It may offer a more stable foundation for strategy because it captures a conflict rather than a single momentary preference. However, it should still be treated as a hypothesis requiring evidence rather than as an unquestionable psychological truth.

Sample Across Time, Not Just Across People.

Most research asks many different people questions at one point in time. Fewer studies repeatedly ask the same individual questions across different situations and states. However, research on projection bias and state-dependent preferences shows why these within-person differences can matter.

Brands could therefore study the same consumer during planning, purchasing, and consumption rather than relying exclusively on a single interview. The contradictions uncovered through this process should not automatically be dismissed as noise. They may reveal how strongly context shapes actual behaviour.

Build Positioning That Can Survive Contradiction.

A brand insight that works only when the consumer behaves consistently is built on unstable ground. Stronger brand platforms may be flexible enough to remain relevant whether a person is feeling disciplined or indulgent, because the platform is built around the conflict between those states rather than around only one of them.

This does not mean that a brand should try to stand for everything. It means that its positioning should recognize the different contexts in which consumers encounter, evaluate, and purchase within the category.

The Honest Version of the Slide

Maybe the slide should not say “Key Consumer Insight” at all.

Maybe it should say:

“Key Tension We Are Betting On, as of This Quarter.”

Less impressive font. Far more accurate.

Consumer insight, in the sense of a single fixed truth permanently lodged inside a person’s head, probably does not exist. What exists is a person in motion, whose preferences and judgments can shift with memory, context, psychological distance, and temporary states (Kahneman, 2011; Loewenstein, 2005; Loewenstein et al., 2003; Trope & Liberman, 2010).

Marketing insight is therefore best understood as a marketer’s evidence-based attempt to identify which pattern or tension will be influential often enough, among enough people, to justify building a brand strategy around it.

That is a less comforting story than “We found the truth.”

But it is one that is more likely to survive contact with a human being who goes to sleep wanting one thing and wakes up wanting another.

References

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Loewenstein, G. (2005). Hot-cold empathy gaps and medical decision making. Health Psychology, 24(4, Suppl.), S49–S56. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.24.4.S49

Loewenstein, G., O’Donoghue, T., & Rabin, M. (2003). Projection bias in predicting future utility. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4), 1209–1248. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355303322552784

Sharp, B. (2010). How brands grow: What marketers don’t know. Oxford University Press.

Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-level theory of psychological distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440–463. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018963