AI in Product Innovation: How Accurately Can an Artificial Target Group Simulate Real Customers?

• Scientist Monika Imschloß on the Simulation of Purchasing Behavior
• Developer Paulo Salem on Interaction in Groups of AI Personas
• Innovator Julian Mangold on the Use of Generative AI for Prototype Testing
• Five aspects to take away

Use AI to create a digital twin of your target group to better understand their needs, test ideas earlier, or evaluate prototypes more realistically. This is exactly what expert Joe Pulizzi recommends in the episode "Unconventional Content Marketing Strategies" of the podcast This Old Marketing, aired at the end of 2024. Pulizzi is a luminary in the field, with over 250,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Pulizzi is supported by around 3,000 market researchers from 14 countries. They predict that, soon, it won’t be humans testing your products, but their AI-generated counterparts. By 2027, "more than half of traditional market research could be conducted using AI-created synthetic personas," write the authors of the Market Research Trend 2025 report.

But how well does this so-called silicon sampling work? And how realistic is this forecast? ISPO has investigated what’s behind the trend, how you can already benefit from it today, and why using synthetic target groups can give you a clear competitive advantage.

Monika Imschloß is a Professor of Marketing at Leuphana University Lüneburg. She has been researching multisensory marketing for years and is now exploring this field using artificial intelligence.

ispo.com: What does science know about synthetic personas?

Monika Imschloß: We are investigating whether large language models (LLMs) can reproduce effects known from marketing research. For example, we used ChatGPT 4.0 to test whether human response behavior can be replicated in synthetic surveys. One example is the "Exciting Red and Competent Blue" effect, where brands with red logos appear more exciting, and brands with blue logos appear more competent.

When we present the logos separately to ChatGPT, the results are less clear. However, if both logos are shown to ChatGPT at the same time, the effect, which we also observe in human test subjects in previous marketing studies, becomes more visible.