Closing the say-do gap: what live experiments reveal that surveys miss with Kate O'Keeffe
April 21, 2026
Consumers often behave very differently from what they say in surveys, creating a critical gap in how decisions are made. In this episode of The Curiosity Current, Kate O’Keeffe, CEO and co-founder of Heatseeker, explains why traditional research methods struggle to predict real-world behavior. She explores how live market experiments help teams identify true buying drivers, validate decisions before launch, and generate insights that reflect actual customer actions rather than stated intent..This episode explores how live experiments reveal what actually drives decisions.
In this episode of The Curiosity Current, Kate O’Keeffe, CEO and co-founder of Heatseeker joins Molly to discuss the limitations of traditional market research, the persistent gap between what people say and what they do, and how live market experimentation is reshaping how modern teams make decisions.
Kate shares her journey from building a consumer brand to leading innovation at Cisco and BCG, where she saw firsthand how difficult it was to get reliable customer insight. That experience led her to build Heatseeker, a platform designed to test real customer behavior through live experiments rather than relying solely on surveys or interviews.
The conversation explores why surveys often fail to predict real-world behavior, how marketers can identify true buying drivers, and what it takes to generate insights that actually influence decisions. Kate also explains how experimentation and synthetic audiences can work together, and why the future of market research depends on combining behavioral data with real-time validation.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why there is only a 20 to 30 percent correlation between stated intent and real behavior
- How live market experiments reveal true buying drivers
- Why surveys struggle to capture real decision-making context
- How to use experimentation to validate strategy before launch
- What synthetic audiences can and cannot do today
- How to ensure research is applied instead of ignored
- Why real-time insight is becoming critical in modern marketing
Episode Resources:
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