Synthetic Market Research 101

What you need to know about synthetic market research, and how it can be applied to market research, user research and product testing

Synthetic market research is a rapidly growing field that makes it very easy for individuals to perform accurate market research, at scale, in minutes.

Unlike traditional market research, synthetic market research gives you almost instantaneous insights and answers. It allows you to research and interview anyone, anytime, anywhere. The results are accurate and highly insightful, meaning you can use them for major decisions immediately.

Most people have not heard of synthetic market research, so here's a quick primer on what it is, and how it works

Key Takeaways

• Synthetic market research allows you to perform market research, product testing, or get user feedback in minutes, with anyone, anywhere, anytime

• The field is based upon research studies by the University of Cambridge, Harvard, and various consulting firms

• Fundamentally the technique uses AI to build complex human "brain models"

• These brain models ingest news, react to world events, interact with each other, go to work, flirt with a barista, or get snowed upon - they're as close to real humans as we can get

• This means that you can interact with them like real humans, and they answer like real humans

• Our customers use these interactions to perform market research, get product feedback, understand customer needs, even trade on the stockmarket

Our synthetic personas are literally living in the matrix.....

Let's dive in to how this works!

Synthetic personas

Our synthetic personas are based on our proprietary brain model, which you can read about in great boring detail here.

Put simply thought, we've recreated all the interactions that humans have, along with all the ways they process those interactions, plus all their life history. This includes:

• Detailed life history - their education, lifestyle, family, upbringing

• Personality and emotions - are they conscientious? a bit neurotic? very detailed oriented? kinda forgetful?

• How they speak - do they have wide vocabulary and florid language? Or are they straight to the point?

• Desires and drivers - are they people-pleasers of looking for an argument? Do they try to tell you what you want to hear?

• News and world events - each synthetic human watches tv, reads the news, listens to the radio or just scrolls TikTok as appropriate - so they all have their own perspectives on what's going on

These elements combine into a complex model that accurately recreates the human brain....like this...

Simple, right?

How to use Synthetic Personas

It's fun chatting with synthetic personas - I got lost down a rabbithole of 90's Paul Verhoeven movies with one - but that's not the best way to use synthetic personas.

Market research typically recruits research groups of individuals that might be interested in their offering, and get feedback from them. We do the same with synthetic personas.

Each of our clients have access our database of over 320,000 synthetic personas, and choose which personas they want to talk to. Pregnant Moms? Check! Rural farmers? Check! Overpaid lawyers? Check! Anyone. We interview our personas just like a professional market researcher would, and recruit the right personas to answer our clients' questions.

Some of the more interesting interesting groups we've been asked to recruit include:

• Rural cattle farmers

• CEOs and CFOs of FTSE 100 companies

• Moms of newborns

• Affluent working parents in high-paid professions with significant disposable income and two or more children, of whom one is toddler-aged, who have part-time housekeepers

You get the idea. Anyone. Anywhere.

Wait...320,000....WHY???

Right, here's the thing - market research needs to be statistically grounded so that you can make clear, accurate, confident decisions. Market research studies very carefully calibrate their participants to the broader audience. Synthetic market research needs to do the same thing.

We've created 320,000 synthetic personas (and are creating a lot lot more) because we need to confidently and accurately model entire populations in their great human variability.

For example, our flagship model statistically accurate reflects the entire population of the United States. We used a wide and detailed variety of data sources (including census, IRS, PUMS, PUMA, Pew Research, linguistic analysis, electoral rolls, state reporting etc etc etc) to very accurately model our personas so that they represent the entirety of the United States. This means that we can perform government policy-level research.

For our clients, it means that our personas are rich and varied. Example, they're a Mom from a broken home, struggling with 2 kids, but making ends meet via a professional career. They're a young immigrant starting to get a foothold in a new country but with a tenuous grasp of customers. They're broad, rich and illustrative.

Our synthetic personas are statistically representative of entire countries in their breadth and depth

What you can do with Synthetic Market Research

Our clients use our synthetic market research product for a wide variety of tasks, from the obvious (market research) to the bizarre.

Here's some of the most interesting uses we've seen so far:

1. Venture capital due diligence - some of our clients are venture capital investors, and they use our product in due diligence to understand if customers want the products they're considering investing in.

2. Government policy work - a major international financial hub is using our research to understand broader public perceptions.

3. International research from home - sit on your couch and interview Moms in Germany, farmers in Brazil, or pensioners in France. Easy, accurate, immediate - and no jetlag

4. Optimize (y)our product - yup, we use our own product to do product research - we got some amazing insights on our new onboarding flow from our synthetic panel

5. Political campaigns - test your campaign messaging, react to news, fine-tune that catty response tweet. Market research in minutes means you can react at the speed of politics

6. Day trading - want to pre-empt the employment figures? Trade with confidence on new product releases. Test how people respond to news. Accurate insights in minutes that you can trust.

7. Market research - oh, yeah. You can use it for market research.

Okay - how do I get started?

Simple - book a call with us and we'll understand your needs.

We can get you up and running and performing market research within 30 minutes - simple, easy, and deeply insightful.