Can AI-Assisted Market Research Be Trusted?

When Joahne Carter commissioned AI-assisted analysis to reposition ladies’s well being model Semaine Well being, she didn’t inform her analysis advisor the entire plan.

Whereas Yogesh Chavda constructed artificial personas and ran 15 positioning ideas by means of an agentic AI workflow, Joahne quietly carried out a parallel examine with actual customers. She wished to know if artificial knowledge might truly be trusted earlier than she would stake the model on it.

The outcomes mirrored one another nearly precisely. That’s when Joahne knew she had one thing.

Her expertise factors to a query each marketer is now asking: Are you able to belief AI to information high-stakes model choices?

Joahne, chief advertising officer at Semaine Well being, and Yogesh, founding father of Y2S Consulting, lately joined the Content material Advertising Institute and its sister model TMRE for the webinar, Can You Trust AI for Brand Decisions? A Real-World Test from Strategy to Results.

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Collectively, they shared how AI-assisted analysis alongside conventional validation helped reposition the model with confidence and measurable success.

Watch the webinar or learn on to listen to their story:

Huge-brand advertising analysis on a startup finances

Joahne heads up each advertising and insights for Semaine Well being, which provides nutritional vitamins, minerals, and dietary supplements by means of retail shops and direct-to-consumer channels. 

It traces its roots to a scientific course of: A bioengineer and his spouse got down to create pure dietary supplements to handle the foundation reason for her endometriosis. 

“From there, Semaine was actually born out of a necessity to assist somebody, and that’s nonetheless a lot of the DNA of the model: to only carry higher options to ladies’s well being,” Joahne says. 

In some methods, it’s nonetheless very a lot a start-up mentality, with a commitment to testing and iterating the whole lot from merchandise to messaging. However Joahne isn’t any startup newcomer. Earlier than becoming a member of Semaine, she spent years at Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, the place she labored on billion-dollar manufacturers together with Olay, Natural Essences, and Listerine. 

She is aware of precisely what a fully-resourced analysis course of appears like — and what it prices. Sporting a number of hats at a lean group, she faces fixed stress to get analysis proper, rapidly, and affordably.

Why conventional market analysis wouldn’t work

When Joahne wished to validate the model’s advertising to ensure it resonated with the audience, she enlisted Yogesh, a fellow P&G alum, for his market analysis experience. 

She knew firsthand {that a} conventional analysis plan entails months of intensive work with a big workforce, vital sources, and quite a lot of instruments. A typical course of consists of:

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Joahne wished to guage 15 concepts, however restricted sources meant the standard analysis path wasn’t an possibility. A completely comparable course of at a serious CPG model would price considerably extra and take three to 6 months.

So, she and Yogesh determined to make use of agentic AI for the info basis, whereas conserving human insights on the forefront to evaluate any branded strategic instructions. 

How AI market analysis truly labored

Joahne already had an thought of Semaine Well being’s audience and model positioning. 

So, Yogesh advised utilizing agentic AI fashions — autonomous techniques constructed on giant language fashions (LLMs) — to pressure-test her 15 concepts utilizing artificial knowledge as an alternative of recruited customers.

“An agentic mannequin principally is a collection of steps that you are taking in a workflow, of the way you go from begin to end to do model positioning work,” he explains.

Artificial market analysis makes use of AI-powered simulations to mannequin human habits, preferences, and knowledge. Producing artificial personas primarily based on real-world knowledge lets companies check ideas and survey designs to tell their advertising methods sooner than conventional recruiting. For instance, a spotlight group AI module can replicate the questions and construction of a human focus group with artificial respondents.

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Utilizing these modules, Yogesh constructed a pattern of artificial respondents that might be used qualitatively and quantitatively, in addition to to create personas.

“I actually appreciated that the steps that Yogesh included within the workflow positively paralleled what you’ll do in a conventional course of,” Joahne says.

Constructing the system wasn’t with out friction. Yogesh describes the method as architectural — designing the plan earlier than constructing it, a lesson he realized the laborious method. 

“As soon as I constructed the plan, then it was simpler for me to go and execute it and really simplify and operationalize the system,” he says. “My suggestion is simply soar in, begin planning and begin constructing, and you will study by means of trial and error what’s truly working and what’s not.”

Testing the artificial knowledge with out telling anybody

The agentic workflow winnowed the 15 concepts to a few in a matter of weeks. In a conventional market analysis course of, that step alone would have taken months.

Yogesh started with Joahne’s audience definition and constructed an in depth persona from it, overlaying demographics, psychographics, path to buy, key touchpoints, and the emotional and practical tensions round class utilization. 

From that persona, he generated roughly 300 artificial respondents, crafted with sufficient specificity that the probability of duplication was lower than one in 2,000 or 3,000.

Joahne and Yogesh then agreed on six inquiries to replicate the choices she wanted to make as CMO — evaluating every idea’s distinctiveness, relevance, and emotional resonance. 

All 15 concepts, plus a aggressive benchmark idea, had been run by means of the mannequin, producing a knowledge file of 300 respondents throughout six questions throughout 16 ideas. Batching that quantity by means of the system was a key technical problem for Yogesh to resolve, however the output gave each qualitative and quantitative alerts from the identical artificial pattern.

An artificial qualitative spherical was carried out to probe the why behind the numbers. The highest performers weren’t the ideas Joahne had initially anticipated to win. One thought she hadn’t favored surfaced as a frontrunner. With out the fast qualitative follow-up to grasp why customers responded favorably to it, she says the workforce probably would have set it apart and moved ahead with a much less optimum selection. The velocity of the artificial course of made that additional investigative step attainable in hours relatively than weeks.

Nonetheless, Joahne wished to check the benchmark ideas validated within the AI-powered focus group. With out telling Yogesh, she carried out a smaller quantitative examine with actual folks, that includes the identical purchaser personas and questions. It centered on the highest three concepts.

The validation examine proved fruitful. The research mirror one another with a typical variability that Joahne would anticipate in two conventional analysis research. 

Your entire course of — from 15 concepts to validated positioning — took roughly six weeks at a fraction of the fee. Joahne estimates the AI-assisted method ran roughly 80% lower than a comparable conventional examine would have price at a serious CPG firm.

Joahne was prepared to position (some) model belief into the strategic choices.

Taking the brand new positioning to market

The artificial knowledge with a dose of human perception allowed Joahne to make definitive model advertising technique choices: “We will market with this. That is what our model stands for. It’s our tagline … It is like it’s dwelling, respiratory, actually, actually what the model stands for.”

The brand new positioning rolled out throughout promoting, retailer shows, and well being care skilled outreach. Semaine Well being additionally redesigned its web site across the new technique.

In a market check evaluating the brand new artistic towards the management, the model noticed double-digit will increase throughout each channel.

“What we’re seeing with the brand new positioning is that we’re growing the typical order worth, which is behind the brand new positioning,” Joahne says. “So, persons are truly shopping for into it and spending extra on the model, and we’re truly rising when it comes to new customers.”

Making the case for trusting AI within the analysis course of

Joahne’s takeaway is not that AI replaces the laborious questions of promoting technique. It is what provides entrepreneurs a greater shot at answering them.

“What ought to our positioning be? Who ought to we goal? These questions do not go away,” she says. “Understanding the buyer journey, AI helps you with all these issues. However these are enterprise conditions that you’ll proceed to come across. It is simply vital to consider, can this instrument assist me get to a greater end result?”

For entrepreneurs seeking to broaden their use of AI, Joahne and Yogesh advocate a number of factors to contemplate:

The Semaine Well being case demonstrates that trusting AI-assisted analysis doesn’t should imply taking it on religion. Joahne didn’t. She examined it, validated it towards actual customers, and solely dedicated as soon as the info earned her confidence.

AI-assisted analysis places your conventional analysis instincts to work to assist sooner choices that drive actual outcomes. So, begin small, validate outcomes, and preserve human oversight on the forefront.

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