Closing the say-do gap: what live experiments reveal that surveys miss with Kate O'Keeffe

Episode notes

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.