# Not everything that moves in the mind moves in the market

*Why buyers can notice, like, prefer, and intend to act without actually doing it.*

**Written by JD Prater, 3x VP of Marketing.** This piece is part of *Open Folders*, which sits at the intersection of marketing science, consulting research, and practitioner experience, opening the parts of the discipline most marketers never got taught, so they can lead the whole of it, not just the slice they came up in.
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Website: https://jdprater.com
Original post: https://jdprater.substack.com/p/not-everything-that-moves-in-the

Today is Tom Cruise's birthday. In case you didn't know, he does his own stunts. So when he decides to run across a rooftop, or hang off the side of a plane, his intention and his action are happening at the same time. There's no gap to close. It was never opened.

Most buyers are not Tom Cruise.

Most buyers are closer to Buster Bluth. He joined the Army on a whim, then froze in the field, unable to decide which way to run.

When we were evaluating an MMM platform at a fiber internet company, the decision didn't start from zero.

Mutinex had been on our CMO's radar for almost a year. By the time we got serious, they were already on the shortlist. We still had to do the demos, the diligence, and the comparison. But the decision only moved when a few things came together at once.

I was being asked measurement questions I couldn't answer with the tools we had. Were radio ads working? Were sponsorships working? What was actually incremental? Everything was still being judged through last-click attribution in Google Analytics, which told us what happened closest to conversion, not what was driving demand.

At the same time, it had become a CMO priority and a board priority. The alignment that had been forming for months finally clicked into place. The business case was clear. The threshold for action dropped enough for the decision to move.

The intention had been building for months. The conditions for action hadn't arrived.

That's the intention-to-action gap up close. And it shows up everywhere: in campaigns that move the funnel without moving the market, in deals that stall after the shortlist is formed, in buyers who say all the right things and then do nothing.

## **Intent is not action**

Intentions matter. They're among the better clues we have about future behavior. But they're still partial clues.

Intentions predict behavior, but not perfectly. In a longitudinal study of cardiac rehabilitation patients, Sniehotta, Scholz, and Schwarzer found that behavioral intentions explained 11% of the variance in whether patients actually exercised.

That's a useful corrective for marketers. A buyer can think well of the brand. They can say the solution makes sense. They can tell you they plan to buy. And still nothing happens.

Part of the problem is that we flatten different states into one blurry sense of progress. Awareness isn't the same as consideration. Consideration isn't the same as preference. Preference isn't the same as intent. And intent isn't the same as action.

Those are different conditions. They do different jobs. They shouldn't all be read as if the buyer is now close to moving. Sometimes they mean the buyer is closer. Often they mean the buyer is more open than they were before.

That still matters. It's not the same thing as behavior.

## **The gap is where friction does its work**

The space between wanting to do something and actually doing it is where friction does its work.

Some of that friction is practical. The path is unclear. The next step takes too much effort. The price feels high. The product is hard to access. The timing is wrong.

Some of it is psychological. The decision still feels risky. The buyer isn't confident enough. The option feels unfamiliar. The cost of making the wrong choice feels higher than the cost of waiting.

Some of it is social. The buyer worries how the choice will look to a boss, a spouse, a peer group, or a team. Even a good option can stall if it feels hard to justify.

And some of it is organizational. Budget isn't approved. Procurement hasn't started. The right person isn't in the room. Legal, IT, or finance aren't aligned. The buyer may be ready, but the organization isn't.

I watched this happen at an early-stage B2B startup. We had a deal five months in the making. The champion was sold. The evaluation was done. Legal had signed off on the terms.

Then three weeks of silence.

One email: the budget had been frozen in a restructure above her. A reorganization two levels up had paused all new vendor commitments until the next quarter. The problem we solved hadn't changed. The business case still held. Her intent hadn't changed.

What changed was a decision made in a meeting she wasn't in.

That's Buster Bluth's loop too. He starts something new. Panic sets in. A family crisis or one of Lucille's demands interrupts, and he drops it. Every time. The interruption always won.

That's why "they didn't convert" rarely explains enough. It hides more than it reveals. Usually the more useful truth is simpler: the threshold for action stayed too high.

The intention-to-action gap is where desire meets friction.

## **Not all positive movement is doing the same job**

Affect matters here too. The "emotional buyer" framing understates what affect actually does. In many cases, feeling is the judgment.

You know within thirty seconds of walking into an apartment. The rest of the viewing is justification. The closets, the outlets, the parking questions. None of it is evaluation. The feeling was the decision. Everything after that is building a defense case for a verdict you already handed down.

Paul Slovic and colleagues describe affect as the felt quality of "goodness" or "badness" attached to a stimulus. When the full question is hard, people rely on that felt quality instead. Does this feel familiar? Does this feel safe? Do I trust this enough? Does this feel worth doing now?

Those aren't side questions. In many cases they are the practical questions that decide whether action happens.

Under uncertainty, familiarity can feel like lower risk. Trust can feel like lower effort. Relevance can feel like urgency. Confidence can feel like permission to move.

Tom Cruise's confidence isn't a personality trait. It's built. He works with the same crew, movie after movie, and rehearses each stunt hundreds of times before a camera ever rolls. By the time you see him hang off the plane, the gap already closed in a hangar six months earlier.

Most buyers don't get that rehearsal. Nobody buys a CRM often enough to get good at buying a CRM. No crew, no repetition, no six months of practice. The confidence has to come from somewhere else.

Different signals do that work differently. Some lower uncertainty. Some build familiarity. Some make the choice easier to defend.

I saw this at a speech AI startup. People would tell us they liked following the founder online. They trusted the way he thought. They felt familiar with the company before they ever got deep into the product.

That familiarity didn't replace the product. We still had to meet the need. We still had to make the economics work. But it changed the starting point. The company felt more knowable, more credible, and easier to take seriously.

A buyer can be more aware without being more ready. A buyer can be more interested without being more able to act. A buyer can prefer you and still defer the decision.

Not all positive movement reduces the same friction.

## **Relevance and timing do more work than we like to admit**

A lot of non-conversion is deferral.

The buyer may like you. The buyer may trust you. The buyer may even expect to come back. But the category isn't important enough right now, the trigger hasn't arrived, or the cost of acting is still higher than the cost of waiting.

That's why relevance matters. The question is whether the category matters right now. Is there a need for speed? Or is this one still sitting in the hangar?

Buyers don't act as members of segments. They act in situations. What matters is what they already know, how they feel, and whether the category matters now.

That changes a lot. Some "lost" demand is simply not active yet. Weak conversion doesn't always mean weak perception. Good marketing connects the brand to the moments where action becomes possible.

Nobody is shopping for a CRM at twelve people. Then the team hits forty, a deal falls through the cracks, and the category opens. The trigger is situational, not demographic.

Jenni Romaniuk's work on Category Entry Points names this precisely. CEPs are the cues buyers use to access memories when faced with a buying situation. Those cues can be internal (motives, emotions) or external (time, place). CEPs are about the buyer, not the brand.

I mapped the seven entry points into a full audit here: jdprater.com/cep-audit

> **Research flag (2026-07-22) — to weigh before finalizing:** James Hurman ("Is Mental Availability Actually a Thing?", LinkedIn) argues the causal claim underneath mental availability/CEPs — that recall precedes and drives sales, not just correlates with prior purchase — has never actually been proven at brand level. He cites Romaniuk's own 2013 admission that the dynamic relationship between mental market share and sales was unresolved, and notes that directional test still hasn't been run. He also flags a measurement-contamination problem documented since 1970: the CEP/mental-availability survey method (which brands come to mind for a category cue) may conflate memory with prior usage rather than isolating a true causal driver. This doesn't necessarily undercut the CEP framing used here (CEPs describe buyer-side cues, not a brand-recall metric per se), but it's a credible practitioner-level challenge to the broader mental-availability causal chain worth deciding how to handle — acknowledge the caveat, or address it directly — before this post locks. Full triage note in the reading queue.

You can win the argument and still lose the action if the moment is wrong.

## **Good marketing makes action easier**

Good marketing reduces friction between wanting and doing.

That might mean making the next step easier to picture. It might mean making the decision easier to defend internally. It might mean being more present in the moments where the category becomes relevant.

Implementation intentions are useful here. Gollwitzer describes them as plans that specify where, when, and how someone will act on an intention. Specificity converts a high-friction choice into a contextual reflex. In the same cardiac rehabilitation study, when action planning was added to the model, explained variance rose from 11% to 32%. The direct path from intention to exercise was no longer significant. The effect of intention on exercise was fully mediated by action planning.

Fennis, Adriaanse, and colleagues took this into consumer psychology. In the Journal of Consumer Psychology, they tested whether persuasive appeals that made situational cues and behavioral responses vivid could produce the same effect as self-formulated plans. In their experiments, that kind of vividness affected mental imagery. In a follow-up field experiment, it affected actual purchase behavior.

The difference is between a campaign that says "automate your reporting" and one that says "next time you are buried in end-of-month spreadsheets on a Friday night, this is the link." Same product. One names a benefit. The other builds a plan.

The difference between "I should look into this" and "I'll book the demo on Thursday" is a structure problem. One is a goal. The other is a plan.

Vague desire is fragile. Specific action paths are stronger.

A lot of marketing leaves the bridge half built. It creates favorable movement, then assumes behavior will take care of itself. Often it won't.

## **In B2B, the gap gets bigger because action has more gates**

A team may want the solution. The shortlist may be forming. The preference may be clear. The business case may even be taking shape. And still nothing happens.

The Mutinex evaluation looked exactly like this from the inside. Intent established. Preference clear. The decision waited for organizational alignment, measurement urgency, and a business case that crossed the threshold. All three had to arrive at roughly the same time.

The formal explanation usually sounds like vendor evaluation, pricing, and fit. And all of that matters. But a lot of the real movement happens earlier: familiarity, credibility, internal alignment, and whether the organization is ready to act.

In B2B, the intention-to-action gap is often organizational before it's psychological.

Physical availability matters here too. Ehrenberg-Bass defines it as being easy to find and buy. In B2B, that means presence in the places buyers are looking when they're ready to act: analyst reports, peer recommendations, the shortlist that forms before the RFP.

Marketing can't solve every barrier on its own. But it can affect whether the buyer feels ready enough, safe enough, and justified enough to move once the moment arrives.

## **Why marketers keep over-reading intent**

I think marketers overread intent for an understandable reason.

Upstream movement is easier to see. Awareness lifts are easier to spot than behavior change. Consideration is easier to survey than actual buying. Intent is easier to report than the long, messy process of action.

So teams start treating those signals as if they were the thing itself.

Research says people liked the work. Brand lift says intent moved. Traffic says interest increased. Then finance asks where the growth is.

The movement happened. It stopped short of action.

Measure the movement. Don't mistake it for a sale.

The buyer feels closer. The survey looks better. The dashboard moves. But the buying conditions may still not exist.

That's psychological proximity mistaken for commercial proximity. Intent can be evidence of progress. It's not evidence of conversion.

I wrote about the organizational version of this in [the say-do gap post](https://jdprater.substack.com/p/bonus-edition-the-say-do-gap-isnt): the distance between what organizations say about brand investment and what they actually fund. This is the buyer-side version of the same problem. Both gaps are real. They need different tools.

Awareness isn't action. Preference isn't action. Intent isn't action.

## **The Monday Version**

Before diagnosing poor conversion, name the friction type.

**Practical:** Is the path to action clear? Is the next step too much effort?

**Psychological:** Does the decision still feel risky? Is waiting safer than deciding?

**Social:** Can the buyer defend this choice to the people they answer to?

**Organizational:** Has the business case cleared the gates: budget, authority, procurement, alignment?

These require different responses. The fix depends on the type of friction.

Name it first. Then decide what marketing can actually do.

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Not everything that moves in the mind moves in the market.

Opening Folders, JD