Beyond Synthetic Personas: Why Dynamic Personas Are the Future of Consumer Research
By BoltChat AI
- article
- AI
- Artificial Intelligence
- Qualitative Research
- AI Moderation
- AI Interviews
- Automated Reporting
- Persona Templates
Summarise with AI
From a technology perspective, synthetic personas are obviously a big trend in our industry right now. I think the industry is still trying to find the right use cases for it. At Bolt Insight, we have AI personas, which we call dynamic personas, and I’ll explain why this distinction is so important.
There’s a major flaw with traditional synthetic personas, and people are more and more realising this now. When you create synthetic personas like you did with traditional habits and attitudes studies, they become outdated so easily.
Let me give you my favourite analogy to explain this problem: synthetic personas are like driving a car by just looking at the rear-view mirror. You are always looking back, and when you want to innovate, you need more creative thinking, breakthrough ideas, and innovation.
This article covers part of the The Founders & Leaders Series podcast episode 5. Listen to the full episode here:
Episode 5: Hakan Yurdakul, Co-Founder & CEO, Bolt Insight
The Dynamic Personas Solution
To solve this, what we created in our platform is what we call dynamic or live personas. You can create personas using the interviews that are in our platform, but you can also upload your own external data to make them smarter and train them better. But then – and this is the key difference – we conduct regular interviews with people on a weekly or monthly basis to keep those personas updated.
Here’s how this works in practice: let’s say you’re a personal care company in the UK. We actually find out what the influential markets are in that space. For personal care, it would most likely be Korea due to the K-beauty trends, or Japan, for example. We discover new products and trends, and ask people on a regular basis what they think about these innovations.
We expose them to the future of that category, and all their reactions are captured and used to train those personas. Whenever you ask a question to that persona, they become informed about more future stuff and what’s happening in the market. If there’s an election happening, a financial crisis, or tariffs being discussed, they’re already knowledgeable about those topics.
This is very different from standard synthetic personas that were created when they first started and what people still know about synthetic personas today. It’s an entirely different, more lively approach, and that’s going to be a big trend moving forward. We’re so happy to lead that space.
Beyond Just Personas
Our vision extends beyond just dynamic personas – we’re building what we call the AI Chief Insights Officer. Imagine having your AI innovator, AI marketeers, AI insights officer, who you can ask questions to whenever you want. If the data exists in the data lake, it will be analysed and give you answers. If not, it will identify the gaps and tell you, “Look, I need to speak to 300 people in these markets to be able to come back with answers to your question”. And we’ll do that and come back.
This is the future, not just looking backwards at what consumers used to think, but continuously understanding how they’re evolving, what they’re being exposed to, and how they’re reacting to the innovations and trends that will shape tomorrow’s market.
This article covers part of the The Founders & Leaders Series podcast episode 5. Listen to the full episode here:
