Why Your Customers Say 'I Love It' and Then Never Buy

Before the Segway went on sale, Steve Jobs told Dean Kamen it would be "as important as the personal computer." John Doerr, the venture capitalist behind Google and Amazon, said it might be "more important than the Internet." Kamen projected production of ten thousand units per week within the first year. The hype was so intense that ABC News ran a segment before they had even seen the thing.

On December 3, 2001, Kamen unveiled the Segway on Good Morning America. The audience reacted the way audiences always reacted. They loved it. The technology worked beautifully. It was genuinely futuristic — a self-balancing personal transporter that leaned when you leaned and stopped when you stood straight. Everyone who tried one grinned. Everyone who watched someone try one wanted a turn.

Then it went on sale for five thousand dollars, and almost nobody bought one.

By 2003, total sales were roughly six thousand units — all of which were then recalled for a software defect. By 2007, cumulative sales reached thirty thousand. Over nearly two decades of production, fewer than 150,000 Segways sold in total. That's roughly what Kamen had projected for the first year alone. In 2020, the company stopped making them.

The technology wasn't the problem. The enthusiasm wasn't fake. People who said "I love it" meant it. They just meant it with a part of their brain that has nothing to do with the part that opens their wallet to buy it.

The Three-to-One Ratio

In 2001, a pharmacy researcher named Karen Blumenschein ran an experiment so clean it should be required reading for any entrepreneur building based on customer feedback.

Blumenschein recruited 172 people with asthma from ten community pharmacies across Kentucky. She offered them a real product — a pharmacist-provided asthma management program — at varying price points. The design was simple. Half the participants were asked a hypothetical question: "Would you buy this program at this price?" The other half faced the actual purchase. Same product. Same prices. Same pharmacies. The only difference was whether real money changed hands.

In the hypothetical group, thirty-eight percent said yes.

In the real-purchase group, twelve percent bought.

Three to one. The gap between what people said they would do and what they actually did when money was on the table. It wasn't a rounding error. It was a chasm.

The question is why. Not why people are flaky or noncommittal, but why the brain produces such genuinely different outputs when evaluating the same product under hypothetical versus real conditions. The answer turns out to be physiological, not psychological. It's not about intention. It's about circuitry.

The Hypothetical Trap

When someone evaluates a hypothetical purchase — "Would you buy this?" — the ventromedial prefrontal cortex runs an abstract value assessment. Interesting concept, sounds useful, seems cool. It's the brain doing a thought experiment with no stakes. When that same person faces an actual purchase, credit card out, money about to leave their account, the anterior insula activates. That's the pain-of-paying circuit. It processes the prospect of spending money using some of the same neural architecture that processes physical pain. And it doesn't fire during the hypothetical evaluation.

Your friend who said "I'd definitely buy that" wasn't lying. They were answering a different question than the one you needed answered — one that didn't involve their loss-aversion circuitry, their status quo bias, or the friction of actually changing behavior. And the gap between intention and action isn't just a validation problem — it's the same behavior gap that makes goal-setting fail without a specific trigger linked to a specific moment.

The brain that imagines buying and the brain that actually buys are running fundamentally different computations.

This is what Blumenschein's data captured in a pharmacy. It's what Kamen's team experienced on a global scale. The Segway didn't fail because people were dishonest about their enthusiasm. It failed because enthusiasm and purchase run on different circuits, and the gap between those circuits is where $100 million in venture capital went to disappear.

The Imagination Gap

There's a deeper layer to this, and it explains why even careful customer research can steer you wrong.

Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson spent decades studying what they called affective forecasting — the brain's attempt to predict how it will feel about future experiences. The findings are consistent and predicable: people are systematically terrible at it. The brain uses the current state as a simulation platform for the future state, which is why you overbuy groceries when hungry and underestimate how much you'll enjoy a vacation when you're stressed at work. The simulation engine can only work with the materials available right now, and right now is always a biased sample.

For entrepreneurs, this means customer interviews about future products are contaminated at the source. When someone says "I would never use that," they're simulating from their current context, current needs, current mood. When they say "I'd use that every day," they're simulating from their current enthusiasm without accounting for the friction, habit change, and attention competition of their actual daily life. The Segway focus groups weren't capturing future purchase behavior. They were capturing present-moment excitement projected forward by a brain that doesn't have the hardware to do that projection accurately.

"Tell me about the last time you had this problem" is a better question than "Would you use a product that solves this?" The first retrieves real data from memory — something the brain actually computed when the stakes were real. The second asks the imagination circuit to run a simulation it isn't equipped to run.

The Creator's Blind Spot

And here's the part that makes the whole thing worse. You're not just dealing with customers who can't accurately predict their own behavior. You're dealing with your own brain doing the same thing in the opposite direction.

John Gourville, a Harvard Business School professor, published a paper in 2006 called "Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers" that put specific numbers on this problem — what amounts to a nine-to-one mismatch between creator and customer. Companies overvalue their innovations by about three times — a consequence of the endowment effect (owning something inflates its perceived value) compounded by what Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely later called the IKEA effect (building something yourself inflates it’s perceived value even further). Meanwhile, customers overvalue what they already have by about three times, because loss aversion and status quo bias make the current state feel safer than any alternative. Multiply those together and you get a nine-to-one mismatch between what you think your product is worth and what the customer's brain computes when it's time to actually change behavior.

Nine to one. Not a slight miscalibration. A full order of magnitude.

This is why Microsoft poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Zune and captured two percent of the music player market. The Zune wasn't bad. Reviewers said the interface was arguably better than the iPod's in several respects. It had wireless music sharing, which the iPod didn't. The build quality was solid. But Apple had a hundred million iPods in the wild and an ecosystem of playlists, purchased music, and accessories that represented thousands of hours of accumulated investment. Every day a customer used their iPod without incident, their brain filed more evidence that the current state was working fine. The Zune wasn't competing with the iPod's features. It was competing with inertia — and inertia had a nine-times head start. This same loss aversion that makes past investments feel like future obligations was working against Microsoft from both sides: their customers couldn't let go of Apple, and Microsoft couldn't let go of the Zune.

Your brain literally cannot simulate what your product looks like to someone encountering it for the first time. The curse of knowledge means your priors are permanently contaminated by everything you know — every feature rationale, every design decision, every late night you spent building it. And your customer's brain treats "doing nothing" as the actively preferred option, not as the absence of a choice. You're not selling against competitors. You're selling against the neurological cost of change.