AI-supported addressing of target groups

AI in market research

AI is used in marketing every day at different points of a customer journey: chatbots, service improvement, demand forecasts and much more have long been in the hands of AI. The efficient interaction of human skills, smart data and AI makes targeted marketing, targeting, active sourcing and recruiting easier than ever before.

The situation is somewhat different in market research, for example to create personas: There, AI is still hardly widespread, although it has enormous potential to make market research faster and more efficient, to improve targeting, and to avoid wastage.
Cookies have long been the means of choice for scrutinizing target groups and those who should become target groups in terms of their user activities and settings. Based on this, personalized advertising is then played out to the target group: On the platforms on which they frequently cavort, in the address that the target group desires in words and (moving) images. But firstly, cookies provide only one piece of the puzzle for the complex picture of the target group, and secondly, the "cookieless future" is getting ever closer, at least for third-party cookies.

So how do you, as a small or medium-sized company that doesn't have a complex market research department, get information about target groups and their priorities simply, quickly and straightforwardly? Be it for customers or candidates?

The answer is: with artificial intelligence. Learning algorithms can identify patterns and correlations in large amounts of data, for example on demographics, geography, psychographics, brand and product affinities.

At Persona Institute, we also work with Deep Learning to create your personas: We feed our algorithms with initial data from the company that ordered a persona (data on the target group) and thus search our database of 1.5 million respondents per quarter for their statistical twins. Our AI then enriches the result with data from representative studies and socio-demographic data from the Federal Statistical Office, residents' registration and registry offices. The result is a persona that can be used by the client company to search for candidates, precisely develop new target groups or successfully launch a new product. Customers of the Persona Institute can even chat with the Persona-Sedcard: After clicking on "Chat with XY", the persona's database is sent via an interface to the AI language model "ChatGPT", which then takes on the role of the persona and answers questions as the persona.

The AI used by Persona Institute has no opinion, no cultural background and no ulterior motives, but reflects society as it is. It sees at a glance what is and correlates patterns. With a large enough dataset, like the one used by Persona Institute, this deep learning can be used to represent just about any target group.

The advantages of AI-powered target group analysis are obvious:
AI-powered target group analyses can provide real-time insights into preferences and consumer behavior. They are therefore faster than any other analysis method. Companies can thus model and segment different groups in the shortest possible time and compare them with regard to their key criteria. In doing so, the key criteria (e.g. brand preferences, psychometrics, geographic distribution, media usage...) can be exchanged quickly and agilely to get deeper and deeper insights into the target group. With these deeper insights, AI also provides sub-segments that are used to capture precise product target groups.
AI-created personas come out, which provide media planners with precise information on which channels to play on for which target group and when with which content in order to achieve success without wastage. This leads to an enormous increase in efficiency in communication and media planning.
We can also improve existing personas with this method and enrich them with details.

A lot of information - a playbook, a data-driven persona

Our AI examines each target group from different angles. This enables it to create precise personas per category (demographics, psychometrics, interests...) from potentially very heterogeneous target groups in no time at all - and all on a uniform database. At Persona Institute, we operationalize these personas in a persona playbook.

With the information from the playbook, our customers can find out whether previously used personas or target groups might overlap and thus drain each other's advertising budget. If this is the case, the Persona Playbook with its precise, data-based and segmented personas already offers the solution. With the selective AI-created and data-based personas, the advertising budget is only used where it is supposed to go. Scattering losses and double advertising of individual groups are thus a thing of the past. Another advantage is that companies also have a tool at their fingertips for attracting the attention of previously uninterested customers: You now know where they are and what moves them.

The fact that Deep Learning AI is fast, agile and not very personnel-intensive means that even small and medium-sized companies without a market research department or a large budget can now easily achieve efficient targeting.
Since the algorithms only search for and recognize patterns, and do not see or process any information about individual persons, data protection is also guaranteed. This is because the Persona Institute does not collect any market research data that allows conclusions to be drawn about individual persons - such as the name of the employer or similar.