Focus groups may be a vital marketing tool, providing real-world insights straight from customers’ mouths. However, in addition they have limitations in speed, cost and scope. Fortunately, an answer could also be on its way: synthetic audience testing.
Synthetic audience testing involves creating digital twins or avatars of customers that may answer marketers’ questions.
“Synthetic audience testing would allow me to create that audience using real data,” said Nina Pfister, a partner at innovation advisory firm Silicon Foundry.
Unlike synthetic data, which is artificially generated, synthetic audiences are constructed from real-world data equivalent to demographics, purchasing behaviors, etc. This is rendered in the form of digital avatars representing audience segments that marketers can questions on preferences.
“You could ask them the five w’s,” she said. “Why might you be on the lookout for a brand new complement? When would you buy it? When would you incorporate this into your day by day routine? How might you envision the product?”
A ‘person’ accommodates multitudes
Each “person” in the audience represents a special demographic group and never a person. So, they could possibly be further sorted by geography, income or whatever else you’ve data about.
“For creating those profiles, so much of that continues to be going to be the human defining what the segment consists of,” said Pfister.
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As with every thing in marketing, much will depend upon the amount and quality of data used to construct the audience.
“You must be prepared today to make the most of the opportunities which are going to be available in the next one to 3 years,” she said. “So, what data do you’ve available to you? How organized is your data? Because these models and AI tools are only going to be nearly as good as your data going into them.”
In the development stage
Right now, synthetic audience testing is an “over-the-horizon” technology, albeit one with huge potential. It could replace focus groups and surveys or complement them. These methods aren’t enough by themselves. Focus groups are time-consuming and dear, and a small sample size can distort results. Consumers are less enthusiastic about participating in polls and surveys and aren’t all the time truthful after they do.
By comparison, synthetic audience testing could reduce time to insights. Instead of weeks spent recruiting, conducting and analyzing focus groups, marketers would give you the option to pose inquiries to their synthetic audience and receive responses immediately.
“You can’t iterate quickly should you’re running a spotlight group,” Pfister said. “Whereas should you’re talking to an AI, and also you’re behind a pc, you’re changing things each time you would like. Like, ‘What if we put it in white packaging? What if we put it in sustainable packaging? What would your response be?’”
Easy to check
Pfister suggested that corporations can quickly test synthetic audience’s usefulness by running the same questions with it and traditional focus groups.
Currently, the focus is on grouping individuals based on large language models trained on specific user data moderately than achieving true individual-level understanding or a “segment of one.”
Looking ahead, a key goal of synthetic audience testing is nailing down microsegmentation, which aligns with the broader trend of hyper-personalized marketing. Interestingly, synthetic audiences could possibly be used to know when personalized marketing gets too hyper by gauging what consumers might perceive as “creepy.”
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