Why you should kickstart customer research with synthetic personas

You’ll always need personas, focus groups, and surveys to truly understand consumer behavior. But at the pace marketing moves these days, those methods simply can’t keep up. You can’t wait weeks for feedback when decisions need to be made right now. Research hasn’t become less important, but it’s applied very differently now.

Synthetic personas change that playing field. Not as a replacement for traditional research, but as an accelerator in the early discovery phase. The moment when ideas emerge, directions are explored and assumptions are still open. They let you quickly test ideas against real customer reactions, before internal assumptions take over.

Insights in minutes, not months 

Generative AI creates synthetic personas: profiles that don’t exist but behave just like real customers. Ask them the same questions you’d ask consumers and they’ll give scores, explain their choices, and do so consistently within minutes. You might not stop there with your research, but it’s a way to quickly see which ideas have potential, where resistance lies, and which angles or needs you might have overlooked.  

Generative AI creates synthetic personas: profiles that don’t exist but behave just like real customers. Ask them the same questions you’d ask consumers and they’ll give scores, explain their choices, and do so consistently within minutes. You might not stop there with your research, but it’s a way to quickly see which ideas have potential, where resistance lies, and which angles or needs you might have overlooked.  

“With synthetic research, you can use AI to simulate customer research with roughly 75% accuracy, ready to deploy instantly.”

Jaap Kooij, Senior Director, Marketing Consulting 

Where synthetic personas add value 

Generative AI creates synthetic personas: profiles that don’t exist but behave just like real customers. Ask them the same questions you’d ask consumers and they’ll give scores, explain their choices, and do so consistently within minutes. You might not stop there with your research, but it’s a way to quickly see which ideas have potential, where resistance lies, and which angles or needs you might have overlooked.  

Faster exploration in product development 

In the early phase of product and proposition development, synthetic personas help you think broader and faster. You quickly gain multiple perspectives on an idea: what resonates? What rubs people the wrong way? What gets overlooked? 

This makes it possible to refine, combine, or discard ideas before you invest time and budget in comprehensive customer research. 

Focus on what converts best 

Synthetic personas don’t replace your web and app data, but they do help you to make your CRO less reactive and more purpose-driven. You can ask these personas how they navigate your website, where they drop off, or why a product does or doesn’t make it into the cart. That yields hypotheses that you can validate with A/B tests. In other words: think first, then measure.  

Not answers, but perspectives 

The power of synthetic personas lies not in providing ‘the truth’, but in adding other points of view. This lets you test assumptions faster and with more depth than previously possible. 

By exploring market and consumer reactions from multiple angles, blind spots surface earlier than they typically would through traditional research. 

By exploring market and consumer reactions from multiple angles, blind spots surface earlier than they typically would through traditional research . The effect isn’t more research, but better-timed research: sharper hypotheses right when it makes sense to invest. 

From pilot to practice: what this requires from organizations 
 
A key lesson from recent enterprise AI projects is AI works best when it’s woven into daily workflows, not treated as a side experiment. This applies not just to content or media, but also to strategic work like research and decision-making. 

Take Reckitt: they didn’t treat agentic AI as a pilot, but rolled it out at scale across global marketing teams. The lesson is simple: AI delivers value when it’s used consistently and structurally, not as a one-off. 

The same logic applies to synthetic personas. They deliver impact when they aren’t a standalone tool, but a standard step in how teams explore ideas, compare scenarios, and formulate hypotheses. Instead of standing in for customer research, synthetic personas amplify its impact by making insights more timely and actionable. 

Because everyone can work with an LLM today, fragmentation is a real risk. Without shared context, you’ll get isolated insights that are hard to compare or trust. That’s why it’s crucial to use synthetic personas within a central, company-managed environment. One that is built on existing customer research and first-party data, with clear guidelines for brand, privacy and governance. At scale, this approach turns AI from a standalone experiment into a regular part of everyday decision-making.  

The bottom line: better focus, boosted ROI 
 
Synthetic personas make it possible to conduct market and consumer research with the speed, volume, and depth required today. When time and budget stop being barriers, teams can start nearly every product or optimization effort by gauging customer reactions.  

That check goes beyond a quick indication. Synthetic personas help you to evaluate ideas with a level of depth that was previously unaffordable or impractical. Especially when they are periodically enriched with insights from traditional research, the quality of outcomes remains high.  

The result is earlier and better-grounded input for investment decisions. Not as a replacement for classic research, but as an accelerator that helps direct resources more effectively, thereby improving the effectiveness and ROI of development and optimization. 

Visit Emerce to read the original article in Dutch.