Every CMO I know is under pressure to make faster, bolder calls on creative, messaging, and timing without losing precision. The challenge isn’t creativity. It’s clarity.

Most insight workflows still move too slowly for the speed of the market. Surveys tell you what people say. Focus groups tell you what they think. Both leave a gap between intention and reality, between what customers claim to care about and what actually drives their choices.

A 2024 Deloitte study found that only 27% of CMOs feel confident in their market predictions. Meta’s research shows that stated intent explains less than 30% of real consumer behavior. The rest is noise.

Finding the Heat

At Heatseeker, we’re committed to helping our customers find the heat, which we enable through two core paths: market experiments and customer avatar riffing.

• Experiments show what works in the market.
  
  They test ads, messages, or offers in front of real audiences and surface performance patterns at scale.
  
  
• Riffing reveals why those patterns emerge.
  
  It happens through direct interaction with AI customer avatars trained on millions of verified behavioral data points.

Where experiments give proof, riffing gives context.

Together, they show not only what caught fire, but what fueled it.

This dual motion, testing live and learning in flow, is what makes modern marketing adaptive.

What Riffing Looks Like

Riffing is behavior-first discovery. Instead of waiting weeks for insights, marketers can interact with AI customers in real time.

They can ask how different audiences perceive a new product, how pricing trade-offs land emotionally, or what makes a message feel trustworthy. Each exchange uncovers subtle drivers that shape real-world behavior: curiosity, pride, belonging, fear of loss.

It’s like a jam session between brand and market.

Every riff is a swing at understanding what connects, what misses, and what moments of truth spark response.

Proof in Practice: KPMG’s Live Learning Loop

When KPMG partnered with Heatseeker, they set out to prove that customer obsession could go from principle to practice.

Over just three days, the team ran 25 live experiments across 250,000 people and captured more than 12,000 behavioral signals around connected-home messaging. At the same time, they riffed with customer avatars to explore why some ideas resonated more deeply than others.

What emerged was a sharper view of value:

• Energy savings and security beat convenience in every segment
  
  
• Younger audiences leaned into aspiration and future wealth
  
  
• Older audiences focused on family and legacy
  
  
• Neighborhood-level insights revealed invisible micro-trends

The impact was immediate:

• 30–40% reduction in wasted media spend
  
  
• Up to 40% lift in conversion
  
  
• Research cycles compressed from six weeks to three days
  
  

Sudeep Gohil, Partner at KPMG, called it “a world-first that brings customer obsession to life.”

Ben Massey added, “It’s not just faster, it’s more honest.”

Why Most Teams Struggle to Learn at This Speed

Traditional insight processes assume you can pause, ask, and then decide. But markets don’t wait. Behavior shifts in hours, not quarters.

Teams fall behind because of three common blockers:

1. Lag: Insight arrives after decisions are made.
   
   
2. Bias: Debates about what feels right replace testing what is right.
   
   
3. Fragmentation: Data and testing happen in silos with no shared behavioral system.

Riffing closes those gaps. It links experimentation and learning in real time, so teams can sense the market, respond faster, and keep the creative rhythm alive.

From Lag to Live

When marketers can riff and experiment in the same moment, learning never stops.

Every ad, headline, or offer becomes a live signal that Heatseeker tracks, interprets, and builds upon. The system connects emotional response with behavior to reveal where the heat is, then suggests what to test or refine next.

Marketers can now:

• Explore creative and pricing directions in parallel
  
  
• Measure emotional drivers like trust, aspiration, or value perception
  
  
• Validate and evolve campaigns in under three days

The Leadership Imperative

Boards and CEOs want evidence that marketing decisions are rooted in behavior, not belief.

According to Gartner, brands that use behavioral experimentation in creative development see two to three times higher campaign ROI than those relying only on intent data.

By blending experiments with riffing, leaders build a learning system that is both creative and accountable, one that listens at the pace customers act.

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