Seeing Is Not Perceiving: When Synthetic Consumers Can and Cannot Pretest Visual Marketing

Abstract

Marketers now deploy generative AI agents as synthetic consumers to pretest visual assets such as logos, packaging, and advertising at a fraction of human-panel cost. However, this procedure assumes that a model seeing a visual cue can also perceive its consumer meaning, which is largely untested. We stress-test the assumption using six canonical visual marketing experiments, varying the two levers managers control: model generation (GPT-4o-mini vs. GPT-5.4-mini) and input format (plain text vs. JSON). Every resulting configuration passed the manipulation checks; however, none of the configurations reproduced more than two of the six human effects, and the remainder were nonsignificant. The one exception was a significant reversal of the human pattern. Providing conceptual or empirical evidence through in-context learning steers average responses toward the human effect. Yet steering has a limit: even when it succeeds, a configuration reproduces less than half of the natural spread of human responses and so understates consumer heterogeneity. We integrate these results into an AI governance protocol (Calibrate, Intervene, Deploy) that delineates when synthetic consumers can responsibly screen creatives and when human panels remain necessary.