Three proprietary studies, announced as hypothesis and method.
Audience Intel is commissioning three pieces of primary research into UK professional-services buyer perception. Each one extends the citable record into territory no incumbent currently owns — sized to be defensible, not heroic.
We are publishing the hypotheses and methods now, before fieldwork, as a discipline against retrospective storytelling. Each page below names what the study is designed to test, what counts as a positive finding, what counts as null, and what the study is not.
- 01
Study one
The Fifty-Millisecond Verdict
Can the buyer's first-impression judgement of a professional-services firm be reconstructed at scale from frontier AI?
- Status
- Concept · in design
- Publication target
- Q4 2026
An empirical test of whether the millisecond-scale first-impression judgement Lindgaard's group demonstrated in 2006 can be reconstructed for professional-services websites at scale, using frontier AI agents conditioned to read the way a UK buyer would.
Read the hypothesis and method → - 02
Study two
The £2,000 Decision
How UK professional-services buyers actually make sub-£2,000 purchase decisions — and the gap between vendor-perceived and buyer-actual selection criteria.
- Status
- Concept · in design
- Publication target
- Q1 2027
A mixed-methods study extending the McKinsey B2B Pulse and TrustRadius Buying Disconnect frameworks specifically into the sub-£2,000 professional-services decision — the territory where 67% of buyers now prefer rep-free experience but where almost no large-sample primary research has been done.
Read the hypothesis and method → - 03
Study three
The Credibility Ledger
What buyers actually count as evidence — a primary-research audit of which on-site credibility cues UK professional-services buyers consciously check.
- Status
- Concept · in design
- Publication target
- Q2 2027
An empirical audit of credibility-cue weighting on UK professional-services websites. The Hinge Buyer's Brain series tracks aggregate visibility; the Edelman thought-leadership reports track the perceived value of thinking; no study has decomposed credibility-cue weighting at the individual-buyer level for the UK owner-managed segment. This study fills that gap.
Read the hypothesis and method →
Pre-registered research is the discipline. Announced findings without announced methods are commentary.
Publishing the hypothesis and method before fieldwork constrains us to the original question. When a study runs and finds what we did not expect, the discipline is to publish the unexpected finding rather than re-fit the question to what we found. Replication and critique are invited at each step.