How our obsession with measurability blinds us to the forces that actually drive decisions

Marketing executives have spent decades perfecting ways to measure advertising effectiveness. Brand recall studies, aided awareness surveys, post-campaign research, all asking variations of the same question: Do consumers remember seeing your ad?

But what if the question itself is wrong?

New research in consumer neuroscience reveals a counterintuitive finding: the ads that most powerfully influence purchase behavior are often the ones consumers have no conscious memory of seeing. For an industry spending over $700 billion annually on advertising, this challenges not just how we measure campaigns, but how we think about influence itself.

The implications extend far beyond marketing. In any domain where we try to understand what drives human behavior - from education to healthcare to public policy - we face the same fundamental problem: the things that are easiest to measure often aren't the things that matter most, and the things that matter most are often invisible to our measurement tools.

The Invisible Influence

Thomas Ramsøy, a neuropsychologist and CEO of consumer neuroscience firm Neurons, describes a study that demonstrates this phenomenon with unusual clarity. His team recruited 25 DIY consumers who were actually planning to paint their homes, then randomly assigned them to three groups. One group saw a series of ads that didn't include Valspar paint. The other two groups saw either a 15-second or 30-second Valspar commercial embedded in the same ad sequence. Researchers then sent all participants into a store wearing EEG headsets to measure brain activity.

The behavioral differences were dramatic. The Valspar-exposed groups spent more time exploring Valspar shelves, showed stronger emotional responses, were less price-sensitive, and chose more expensive options. While approximately 70% of the control group bought Valspar (it's a well-known brand), the ad-exposed groups purchased at rates of 85-95%. The 30-second ad proved even more effective than the 15-second version.

Here's where it gets interesting. During checkout, researchers asked participants why they chose Valspar and whether they remembered seeing any Valspar advertising.

"Most people said no, they hadn't seen a Valspar ad. And then we even showed them the ad and people typically recognized it, but they still said, no, it didn't affect my choice."

Instead, consumers constructed elaborate alternative explanations. "People came with all different kinds of stories," Ramsøy notes, "that the color reminded me of my grandma's home or whatever it was." The brain activity data and purchase behavior proved the ads had influenced decisions, yet consumers genuinely believed their choices were entirely independent.

The Conscious Mind as Unreliable Narrator

The Valspar participants weren't lying. They were doing what all humans do: constructing coherent narratives to explain behavior that actually originated below conscious awareness.

This phenomenon reflects a fundamental reality about human decision-making that behavioral economists have documented for decades. Daniel Kahneman's distinction between System 1 (fast, automatic, unconscious) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, conscious) thinking reveals that most choices happen before conscious awareness kicks in. The brain processes stimuli, forms emotional associations, and influences future behavior without that information ever reaching conscious memory systems.

Ramsøy uses an everyday analogy: "Walking from point A to point B, you don't have to think about every single step you do. It's an autopilot thing." The same principle applies to brand preferences and purchase decisions. The brain - consuming 20-25% of the body's energy despite representing only 2% of body mass, actively converts decisions into autopilot behaviors to conserve resources.

This has profound implications. If we ask someone what influenced their decision, we're asking System 2 to report on System 1's activities. It's like asking your conscious mind to explain your heartbeat, you can make up a story, but you don't have access to the actual mechanism.

The Iceberg Problem

Think of human decision-making as an iceberg. What people can consciously report - the responses captured in surveys, focus groups, and recall studies - represents perhaps 10% above the waterline. The 90% below consists of preconscious associations, emotional priming, and familiarity effects that are invisible to traditional measurement but may be where most influence actually lives.

This creates a systematic measurement bias. Any methodology that relies on conscious reporting will undervalue activities that work primarily through preconscious influence. Since "what can be measured" drives "what gets funded," this bias shapes entire strategies.

Research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising supports this. Les Binet and Peter Field analyzed 996 advertising campaigns over 30 years and found that emotional campaigns - which work largely through preconscious processing - outperformed rational campaigns on every measured brand and business metric. Emotional campaigns produced 1.7 brand effects on average versus 1.0 for rational campaigns. They drove higher long-term sales, market share, pricing power, and loyalty.

Yet rational, easily-attributable campaigns often win budget battles because their effects are visible in short-term metrics. The campaigns that build lasting brand equity operate in ways that never show up in traditional measurement.

Three Mental Models for the Invisible

1. The Autopilot Accumulation Effect

Effective influence doesn't just shape one decision - it shapes the neural pathways that will handle future decisions automatically. Each exposure deposits a trace, whether consciously remembered or not. This is why brand building isn't about creating memorable moments; it's about accumulating enough exposure that your option becomes the default autopilot choice.

Foundational research by Brian Knutson and colleagues at Stanford, published in the journal Neuron, demonstrated that brain activity in the nucleus accumbens predicted purchasing decisions seconds before participants were consciously aware of making a choice. The decision circuitry fires before conscious deliberation begins.

2. The Post-Hoc Rationalization Machine

Humans are not reporters of their own decision-making process - they're storytellers. When asked "why did you choose X?" the brain doesn't replay the actual decision. It constructs a narrative that sounds reasonable and preserves the sense of agency. The Valspar participants weren't being dishonest; they genuinely believed their explanations.

This means customer interviews, focus groups, and survey research capture stories, not causes. They reveal how people talk about their decisions, not necessarily why they made them.

3. The Mere Exposure Effect

Familiarity breeds preference - even when the source of that familiarity is invisible to conscious awareness. Someone may prefer your brand simply because they've been exposed to it, without any memory of where that exposure occurred. In a supermarket under time pressure, choice gets nudged by a billboard seen hours earlier that the shopper doesn't consciously remember.

This effect compounds over time. Each "low-attention" brand impression creates implicit memory traces that prime later behavior through channels that never get attributed back to the original exposure.

The Uncomfortable Questions

For attribution: If the most effective influence is invisible to the people it affects, how do you ever build an accurate attribution model? You're trying to assign credit for something the person will actively deny.

For creative testing: Focus groups and recall-based testing favor content that's consciously memorable. But those may not be the messages that most effectively shape preconscious associations. You might be systematically selecting for the wrong thing.

For budget allocation: Finance teams want proof. The most attributable activities win budget battles, while the hardest-to-attribute work, where preconscious effects likely dominate, gets perpetually underfunded.

For competitive intelligence: If a competitor is running campaigns that work preconsciously, you won't see it in aided awareness studies or share-of-voice metrics. You'll only notice when your results mysteriously decline and you can't identify why.

What Changes Practically

Hold measurement methodologies more loosely. Recall, awareness, and survey-based research aren't useless, they measure something real. But they capture conscious associations, which may represent a minority of the effect. Don't let what's measurable crowd out what's important.

Respect the compounding of exposure. The Valspar study showed 30-second ads outperformed 15-second. That's not just about message completion - t's more time for preconscious processing. Frequency and consistency may matter more than any individual creative execution.

Prioritize behavioral data over self-reported data. Wherever possible, observe what people do rather than what they say. Time on site, scroll depth, return visits, search behavior, purchase patterns, these reveal preconscious influence that surveys miss.

Be skeptical of 'it didn't work' conclusions. If a campaign shows low recall and no immediate conversion lift, the standard interpretation is failure. But it might be successfully building preconscious associations that will manifest later, through a different channel, in ways that never get attributed back.

Invest in distinctive brand assets. If preconscious processing works through familiarity and pattern recognition, then consistent visual identity, sonic branding, color palettes, and taglines aren't just "brand guidelines" - they're the mechanism by which repeated exposure accumulates into autopilot preference.

The Broader Lesson

This research illuminates a pattern that extends far beyond advertising: we consistently overweight what we can measure and underweight what we cannot.

In education, we measure test scores because they're quantifiable, while the factors that create lifelong learners remain largely invisible. In healthcare, we track biomarkers and procedure counts while patient experience and long-term wellbeing prove harder to capture. In management, we measure output metrics while the trust and psychological safety that enable high performance operate below the surface.

The measurement tools we've developed are genuinely useful. They illuminate real phenomena. But they also create systematic blind spots - and those blind spots shape our decisions, our strategies, and our understanding of how the world works.

The challenge isn't to abandon measurement. It's to hold our metrics with appropriate humility, recognizing they illuminate part of the picture while leaving much in shadow. The most important forces may be the ones operating so smoothly that we never realize they're there at all.

A Note on the Research

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging limitations in the evidence presented here.

The Valspar study, while compelling, comes with important caveats. The sample size of 25 participants is small for making broad generalizations. This is proprietary industry research conducted by Neurons Inc for their own business purposes - not a peer-reviewed academic study with full methodological transparency. We don't have access to complete details on control conditions, randomization procedures, or statistical analysis. And the research comes from a company with commercial interest in demonstrating the value of neuroscience-based marketing tools.

However, the broader principles are well-established in academic literature. The foundational neuroscience—Knutson et al.'s work on neural predictors of purchases, published in Neuron in 2007 - is peer-reviewed and highly cited. Implicit memory effects on consumer behavior are extensively documented across multiple research programs. The IPA's analysis of advertising effectiveness draws on nearly 1,000 campaigns over three decades.

The Valspar study is best understood as an illustrative case that aligns with established science, rather than definitive proof in itself. The phenomenon it demonstrates—advertising influence without conscious recall, is real and replicable. But as with any single study, particularly proprietary industry research, appropriate caution is warranted in extrapolating its specific findings.

The meta-point, ironically, applies here too: even our evidence for the limits of measurement has its own limits. The pursuit of understanding rarely offers the clean certainty we'd prefer.

Sources

Dooley, R. (2025). "Why Your Most Effective Ads May Be The Ones Customers Don't Remember." Forbes, November 29, 2025.

Ramsøy, T. Z. (2024). How to Make People Buy: The Art & Science of Enabling, Engaging, and Empowering Your Customers.

Knutson, B., Rick, S., Wimmer, G. E., Prelec, D., & Loewenstein, G. (2007). "Neural Predictors of Purchases." Neuron, 53(1), 147-156.

Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ramsøy, T. Z. (2019). "Building a Foundation for Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience Research." Journal of Advertising Research, 59(3), 281-294.