Unlocking the subconscious: How Suzy Speaks captures what consumers feel, not just what they say

In a world where brands are fighting for fractions of attention, understanding how consumers truly feel, beyond what they consciously articulate, has become more critical than ever. The decisions people make about which ads to click, products to buy, or brands to trust happen in milliseconds, powered by what psychologists refer to as System 1 thinking.

These snap judgments are driven by emotion, intuition, and subconscious experience. And while they guide everything from split-second purchases to deep brand loyalty, they often evade traditional research methodologies. This is where Suzy Speaks comes in, offering brands a powerful way to access the emotional side of consumer experiences by capturing voice-based feedback—enabling people to share more naturally and instinctively, all within the same research ecosystem they already trust.

System 1 Thinking: The Hidden Driver of Human Behavior

First introduced by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, System 1 thinking describes the brain’s fast, automatic, intuitive mode of processing. It's the kind of thinking that helps you recognize a friend’s face instantly, decide in a moment whether to trust someone, or react emotionally to a commercial. All without deliberate analysis.

System 2, on the other hand, is slower, more logical, and effortful. It governs tasks like doing your taxes or evaluating a detailed product comparison. But when it comes to brand engagement and consumer decision-making, it’s System 1 that usually takes the lead.

And yet, most research tools are built for System 2. Quant surveys and written open-ends depend on consumers pausing to reflect and rationalize. That means by the time you're analyzing their input, you may be seeing the filtered, sanitized version of how they feel, not the raw, instinctive emotion and subconscious decision making that actually influenced their behavior.

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Introducing Suzy Speaks: Voice-First, Emotion-Rich Feedback

Suzy Speaks is designed to solve that problem by helping brands tap into System 1. Rather than relying on typed responses or moderated interviews, it allows users to organically talk about their experiences with their voice. This subtle but powerful shift unlocks a new layer of insight.

This contextual data transforms a flat response into a three-dimensional snapshot of how someone truly feels. And unlike many other data collection methods, Suzy Speaks captures these voice inputs unfiltered and in-the-moment, allowing researchers to hear reactions in their purest form.

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Seamlessly Integrated Into Quant Workflows

Another core advantage of Suzy Speaks is that it’s integrated within the Suzy ecosystem, where teams already run their quant studies. That means you can blend the precision of statistical data with the emotional richness of voice-based qual, without jumping between tools or managing messy exports.

Need to validate your quant findings with deeper emotional context? Just layer in Suzy Speaks. Want to explore why a particular concept scored high or low? Let your audience speak for themselves, literally. Whether you're a strategist, creative, UX designer, or brand manager, you can gather the kind of emotionally resonant data that shapes smarter, faster decisions.

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Real-World Use Cases: Tapping Directly Into System 1 Thinking

Unlike deliberate, rationalized responses often shaped by System 2 thinking, voice-based insights reveal the instinctive, unfiltered reactions that guide real-world behavior. Here’s how teams are using Suzy Speaks to surface these subconscious cues and unlock deeper emotional truths.

1. Revealing Gut Reactions to Early-Stage Creative

When consumers see an early creative concept, whether it’s a rough sketch, tagline, or storyline, they form an immediate impression long before they articulate why. With Suzy Speaks, brands can capture these first-blush emotional reactions in their rawest form. These are System 1 cues: intuitive, fast, and often more predictive of real-world success than anything rationalized in a follow-up.

2. Understanding Emotional Resonance in Campaigns

A campaign might test well on traditional KPIs like appeal and purchase intent, but that doesn’t mean it’s leaving the emotional mark you intended. System 1 responses often manifest in how people express themselves—the pace of their voice, their choice of words, or spontaneous reactions—giving clues to emotional resonance.

Suzy Speaks helps you access more spontaneous, unfiltered reactions that reflect emotional impact in the moment.

3. Surfacing Unspoken Friction in User Experiences

When navigating a product flow or onboarding journey, users may not consciously realize what’s throwing them off. They might not articulate frustration clearly in a typed response, but speaking aloud often reveals more—through their word choice, pacing, or hesitations—which researchers can pick up on during analysis.

Suzy Speaks allows UX and product teams to pick up on these subconscious friction points, letting users "speak their truth" even when they don’t fully understand or verbalize what's bothering them. This leads to more empathetic, emotionally intelligent design.

4. Extracting Deeper Emotional Drivers for Personas

Traditional personas often focus on demographic or behavioral segmentation, but the most effective messaging taps into emotional motivators; those subconscious beliefs and instincts that guide choices.

With Suzy Speaks, you can listen to how people describe their challenges, values, and aspirations in their own words and natural cadence. Their unfiltered language and spontaneous expression can reveal emotional undercurrents—helping researchers enrich personas with the deeper context that often drives real action.

5. Capturing the ‘Why’ Behind Product Feedback

When users rate a product or describe a feature, their conscious reasoning often reflects their post-rationalized opinion, not the emotional reaction that actually formed their impression.

Voice feedback helps you get closer to the moment an opinion was formed. Spoken responses often surface unfiltered reactions—like hesitation, emphasis, or expressive language—that typed responses may mask. These spontaneous cues offer a window into consumers’ implicit attitudes, which often better predict loyalty, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth.

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From Insight to Empathy

Ultimately, what sets Suzy Speaks apart is its ability to foster empathy at scale. Research is not just about identifying patterns; it's about understanding people. And voice—the most human form of communication—bridges the gap between data and emotion in a way text alone can’t.

Imagine being able to play a clip of a real consumer reacting to your concept during a stakeholder meeting. Or hearing a user describe your onboarding process in a way that reveals subtle frustration or genuine excitement—something that might be missed in a written response. These moments stick with people and drive alignment across teams in ways dashboards never could.

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Why This Matters More Than Ever

In an age of short attention spans, fragmented channels, and shifting expectations, brands need to connect emotionally if they want to cut through the noise. But emotional connection doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when teams understand their audience deeply and design with feeling in mind.

Suzy Speaks is a tool for the brands that want to feel the pulse, not just see the numbers. It’s for the marketers, strategists, and innovators who believe that listening to what people say is not enough. You have to listen to how they say it.

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Final Thoughts

We’re living in a time where the speed of insight is critical, but depth of insight is what creates lasting impact. Suzy Speaks offers a new frontier in research by giving voice to System 1: the emotional, intuitive, often subconscious side of consumer behavior.

With Suzy Speaks, you don’t just collect data. You build understanding. You don’t just validate a message. You hear how it lands. And you don’t just ask questions. You make people feel heard.

And in a crowded marketplace, that might just be your brand’s most powerful advantage.

Tap into the intuitive layer of consumer behavior with Suzy Speaks. Let’s discuss how it can sharpen your insights edge.

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