A food company spends months and significant budget on consumer research before launching a new product. The survey scores are strong, so the store managers stock it. Six months later, the product is quietly pulled from the shelves. The consumers who said they would buy it didn’t.

This pattern—confident prelaunch research followed by disappointing sales—is one of the most persistent and costly problems in marketing. Our research investigates whether brain imaging data can offer something traditional methods can’t: a more accurate window into what consumers will do, rather than what they say they will do.

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