Each month, we choose a potential say-do gap to put to the test. Consumers may think they know themselves and their habits – but how well do they, really? We know survey data is flawed, and in previous experiments, we’ve seen where consumers’ best intentions break down in the real world. This month, our in-the-wild experiment is tackling the notion that most people prefer to cook at home vs spend on takeout. Do you think it holds true? Let’s find out.
It's a formula the entire category has been built on, and it's the one consumers reach for when they explain what makes them buy.
So, we ran an experiment to find the gap between what women 18–45 say drives their beauty purchases vs what actually does.
To validate which purchase motivators actually move the needle, we ran an AI-simulated 100-person survey of beauty category non-rejectors using credible sources.
We asked respondents (women, ages 18-45) to pick the reason a beauty product wins them over, from six options.
Here's what they told us:
Consumers described their beauty purchases almost entirely through performance and personal benefit. Results and confidence carried the conversation while brand affinity barely registered.
Results can feel like a "smart" purchase justification.
It's easier to defend spending on a serum or moisturizer when it's framed as an investment in a measurable outcome. "It gives results you can see and feel" reads as more practical than "the brand matches my vibe and my values."
Confidence works the same way. Beauty has spent years leaning on empowerment language — feel like your best self, boost your confidence, self-care — making confidence a comfortable stand-in for motivations people are less used to saying out loud.
Brand affinity is a little different from the other five purchase motivators. It's not a reason someone consciously weighs — it's baked into a product before a purchase decision ever happens. Quietly, in the packaging. In the tone of an Instagram caption. In the mission statement on the About page. Consumers absorb all of that without ever labeling it a "reason" they bought something. When a survey asks them to name the motivator, brand affinity isn't the thing they're withholding — it's the thing they were never really conscious of choosing in the first place.
Consumers say they shop beauty products for results and confidence because those are the most rational and culturally familiar ways to explain a purchase. Our hypothesis was that these motivations might act as a justification for something people don’t consciously register while shopping — whether that's identity, perceived value, or other cues like brand affinity.
To validate the say against real behavior, we built six ads for a mock branded serum, each one leading with a different motivation, and put them into live social feeds the same way a thousand other beauty ads compete for attention every day. Then, we measured outbound clicks as the real-world signal of what actually got someone to engage.
We saw clear gaps between what they said and what they did across confidence, results, and brand affinity: Confidence and results were overstated in the survey, while brand affinity showed up more strongly in behavior than consumers reported.
|
Purchase motivator |
% Survey responses (say) |
% Behavioral data (do) |
% Say-do gap |
|
Confidence |
24% |
13% |
-92% |
|
Results |
35% |
22% |
-60% |
|
Brand Affinity |
4% |
16% |
+74% |
|
Convenience |
12% |
22% |
+45% |
|
Value |
7% |
13% |
+44% |
|
Personalization |
18% |
16% |
-15% |
Confidence, results, and brand affinity moved the furthest from what consumers reported, and together they explain the gap.
Confidence is the payoff, not the pitch.
Consumers associate beauty with confidence, but confidence may be the emotional payoff rather than the purchase trigger. Decades of beauty marketing have taught consumers to view products as a path to transformation, from improved appearance to increased confidence. But when faced with a choice, confidence alone may not be enough to capture attention.
Everyone claims results. That’s the problem.
Consumers want products that work. But in a category saturated with claims like “clinically proven,” “visible results,” and “before-and-after transformations,” performance has become an expectation rather than a differentiator.
Consumers underestimate their own vibe and values check
Only 4% said a brand's affinity mattered to them. 16% acted on it anyway — and the ad they responded to never once stated a value or a mission. It was a mocked-up product, a color palette, a general sense of "matches your vibe and your values." No ethics claim, no About page. Just a look.
That's brand affinity doing its job quietly. Consumers are constantly reading a brand's packaging, tone, and overall presence and deciding, often without registering that they're deciding, whether that brand belongs in their world. They don't need the values spelled out to feel aligned with them — the visual language does that work on its own. They may never say, "I bought this because the brand represents me." But the feeling of "this brand gets me" is already shaping the decision. Brand identity has become part of how consumers decide which beauty products deserve their attention.
Consumers still need proof that a product works. But this experiment suggests that's no longer what's doing the most persuading — and it's rarely the part consumers can put into words, which makes it easy for brands to under-invest in.
Brand affinity gets built long before someone sees an ad. It's shaped by every choice that goes into how a brand looks and feels: the packaging, the color story, the tone of a caption, the world a product seems to belong to. By the time a consumer sees that product in their feed, the "does this feel like me" question has usually already been answered.
The recent KPop Demon Hunters x Anua campaign is a good example of what brand affinity can look like. "Gonna be glowin'" delivered the functional promise, but the collaboration tapped into an entire emotional world to sell a product through character, story, and aesthetic. For fans, the appeal was participating in an identity they already connected with. Characters like Rumi resonated because her story reflects themes of confidence, vulnerability, and embracing who you are — no mission statement required. Anua didn’t have to build that affinity from scratch. It just had to show up in a world fans already loved.
That's the hard part to get right on instinct alone. A brand can feel confident its packaging and tone are "on brand" without knowing which specific elements are earning trust and which are just noise. Our results suggest that gap is worth taking seriously: brand affinity ranked last on the survey, but it drove the strongest real-world behavior of any motivator we tested.
This is exactly why testing early ideas, concepts, taglines, and prototypes in real-world environments matters so much — surveys can tell you what sounds good, but they can't tell you what actually gets someone to stop scrolling. Orchard's Shape tests are built to close that gap: breaking a concept down into its individual pieces and testing them the way consumers actually encounter them, so a brand knows which elements are genuinely building affinity before it bets on one direction.