A woman I interviewed last week spent four minutes explaining that she buys the store brand because she refuses to pay for packaging. She was articulate about it. She had a whole philosophy, delivered evenly, the sort of answer you want to put on a slide. Then we walked through her last three shopping trips together and the name brand was in two of them. She was not lying to me. She was doing what people do, which is build a tidy reason out of whatever is nearby and hand it over.
I have been running a summer round of interviews for a client in a low-involvement category, and every session has produced the same shape. Confident explanation. Contradicting receipt. Nobody blinks.
This is not a sign that the respondents were bad or that the recruit was soft. It is the normal condition of being a person.
People are reliable reporters of what they did and terrible witnesses to why they did it, and most research budgets are spent on the second question.
The reason is not mysterious. The decision happens fast, in a store aisle or a browser tab, under conditions nobody is narrating to themselves. The explanation gets assembled later, in a conference room, for a stranger with a notebook. The explanation is a performance of reasonableness. It is sincere and it is also constructed, and if you build a positioning on it you have built on a story your customer wrote to look sensible in front of you.
So change the questions. Three that work.
One, ask about the last time, not about generally. Generally produces a policy. Last Tuesday produces a memory, and memories come with the mess attached: the coupon, the kid, the parking.
Two, ask what they did before and after, not why. The sequence tells you more than the motive. What made you go looking that day is the actual insight, and it is almost never the thing they name.
Three, go watch. I have learned more standing at the end of an aisle for two hours than from any deck of stated preference. Watch the hand hover. Watch what gets picked up and put back. That hesitation is the competitive set, and it will not match the one in your audit.
None of this means you stop talking to customers. It means you stop treating their explanations as findings and start treating them as evidence about how they want to be seen.
The explanation is a performance of reasonableness.
I am not exempt. I told my sister I switched coffee because of the roast, which sounds like a person with standards. The truth is the Stumptown on my walk to the bus opens at six and the other place opens at seven. Barnaby has never once explained his preferences and has never once been wrong about them.