How we Quickly and Easily Tested NoFrills Ads
Here's a real-life example of synthetic market research with our synthetic personasFor anyone unfamiliar with Canada, NoFrills is a low-cost grocery store owned by Loblaws - kinda like “Walmart meets Aldi", but in a Canadian grocery wrapper. It's cheap, bountiful, and bright yellow.
We wanted to test how our synthetic personas would react to a real-life example with actual messaging, so I ran some pictures of outdoor ads through a market research group, and we got some really interesting results. Read on to see more!
Quick Refresher - Synthetic Market Research
Ditto has built really sophisticated "brain models" of humans, then populated them with histories, experiences, emotions, personalities and real-time news.
You can chat with these "brain models", aka synthetic humans, and ask them questions. Better still, you can gather a group of them together and ask them all questions, or even show them stuff. They respond exactly like real humans.
Ditto's clients use these synthetic humans for synthetic market research - they get super accurate responses rapidly - and they can use these responses to confidently make major business decisions.
I wanted to run a simple example that people would easily relate to - a Canadian retailer with huge yellow ads that everyone knows - so...here's what I did...
Recruiting some Peeps
NoFrills has stores all across Canada, and I wanted to get a range of different inputs, so I selected 20 participants that were aged 18-65 from our "Canada" model. The selection was pretty broad, and I could easily see where everyone lived, what they earn, who they are etc:
Asking some Questions
Okay - I'm a startup growth person - not a market researcher. But that's okay!
Ditto's "Market Research Study" guided me through the process, including rewriting some of my dumb questions for me. Apparently you shouldn't lead participants during research studies, and swearing at participants isn't "professional".
Yeah - i made that last one up - but I want to make a point about how good this tech is at turning anyone into a professional market researcher
Answers!!!
And...we got some really interesting answers...
First off, I asked some basic questions about where people actually shop (have they even been to NoFrills?!?!?)
Questions 2 and 3 were a bit meh - I didn't feel inspired - BUT the auto-summaries that the system generates automatically are kinda interesting to read if you can't be bothered to look at all the individual responses:
Here's where it gets really interesting though - i uploaded some photos of real life adverts for NoFrills and asked the synthetic participants what they thought of them:
In short, the stereotypical "NoFrills yellow" ads are hitting home, but they're starting to feel old and tired, and they're not really addressing the issues that are important to shoppers these days.
Summaries
This was only 4 questions and 20 participants, but we still ended up with 80 answers to look through - that's a lot of reading. The question summaries help, but what gets really interesting is the automated synthesis of the answers, correlations between respondents, the distinct groups of participants, and the underlying trends.
The Ditto system is built to handle huge market research surveys, and it quickly processed the questions and responses into clear summaries and takeaways. These were all consolidated down into a simple, clear and precise study overview:
Sharing a "Board Ready" Report
The final trick for Ditto is what they call a "Board Ready" report - it's a clear, concise and insightful report that you can share with senior management, the CEO, or the board - to support a major decision, green-light a project, or justify a choice.
It's clear, rich with insights, and consolidates up to specific learnings and takeaways:
Email or DM me for a full copy of the report - I can share it with you easily without login using the secure share function - super simple for collaborating with peers or sending securely to senior decision-makers.
Summary
This is a quick example of how i used an audience of synthetic personas to test real-life ad messaging for a large retail chain. The process of recruiting the participants and asking questions took about 30minutes, and I had a fully completed and really insightful report 15minutes later.
The completed market research report makes it easy to support and justify decisions. It also highlighted a ton of stuff that I'd never considered or thought of before. The insights are superb and very usable.
Stepping back writing this, I think the potential applications of this tech are really wide-ranging. A few ideas that came to mind as I was playing around included:
Big-box retailers could use this technology to test products, concepts, branding and marketings
Can we put Google Ads copy into this and test it with our ideal customers?
What would a Figma or Canva plugin look like? Could we test UI UX components with synthetic Users?
This is tradeable info - could we use it to predict stockmarket movements?
Landing page copy could be optimised by showing it to personas and seeing if it resonates
Due diligence!!!! Imagine sending this to a VC that you want to invest. Or using it to justify a Private Equity deal.
What leapt out to me was how quickly and easily I could run a thorough market research report, and get clear insights and takeaways.
Contact me if you're interested in learning more, running your own market research studies, or trying any of the ideas above (or any of your own!)
