See how AI-integrated focus groups can transform your market research. We look at building personas, querying AI, and refining ideas for engaging content and news articles. Use these skills to unlock deeper audience insights.
These tips are part of the session “AI as a strategic partner and growth engine.” In this session, speaker Laura McDonald, Chief Growth Officer at Hotwire, will help PR professionals learn the latest AI tactics for audience and market research.
This session was part of the PRNEWS PRO online training workshop “AI Shift: Practical Strategies for PR Leaders.”
Watch the entire session at this link.
Complete transcription:
[LAURA MACDONALD]
One area we’re starting to discover is the use of AI to build synthetic focus groups. Do you have a client who does a lot of research on their audience, whether it’s half-baked research you’ve done in the past or persona information created by your marketing team? You can use all of this to build a comprehensive focus group.
It’s not as simple as entering that information into a custom GPT or something. Our AI lab team has to really do the work of mapping all kinds of context and that information, responses from surveys, etc. against the normal distribution of people, the classic bell curve that we’re all familiar with, and identifying things like clusters of personas, but also identifying the volume of those individual types of clusters. And from there, 1, you can not only create that focus group, but you can also create separate types of synthetic personas for each cluster.
And you can even take this a step further and start building focus groups that synthesize what the AI knows about these people, beyond what you get from your clients and what you get from other surveys. I don’t know how many people did that when they were talking about it on LinkedIn, but when you ask ChatGPT what it knows about you, it’s eerily accurate: what job you have, the type of job you do, your personality traits. And then you can use that to actually feed these holistic focus groups as well.
So let’s take a look at a transit client who really wanted to be seen as a government technology company rather than a transit agency. Especially because they really cared about raising their profile with respect to retail investors, and they believed that stocks in government technology and government agencies typically trade higher than stocks in transportation companies. So, using our tool, Hotwire Spark, we were able to have an AI agent act as that specific type of persona and query what questions this persona was most likely to ask a specific LLM and what answers they would get.
What this shows us is that even though the company is positioning itself as a mission-critical technology platform, ultimately what retail investors are really interested in, and the question they’re asking LLMs today is actually how should they value investments in GovTech and what are the risks of investing in GovTech.
And you can use these focus groups in a variety of ways. First of all, it’s just a gut check. Is this topic or message interesting to our target audience? And as we saw earlier in the transportation example, the topics that we really care about, or that our clients really care about, may not be what our target audience is interested in.
Second, will this creative idea resonate with your target audience? How will they react? And being able to run your ideas through synthetic focus groups, just as you could before with real-life focus groups, will help you weed out creative ideas that don’t resonate, and allow you to hone your proposal and validate your ideas before pitching them to a client or actually pitching them. The third purpose for which we started using them is to support future research directions.
If you ask these questions, what are the answers likely to come back? Would they be interesting? We are all too aware that when we are conducting surveys and polls, ultimately for media relations purposes, we are limited in the questions we can ask. And we want to make sure that the questions we ask lead to interesting headlines and interesting news stories that the media might want to write. So being able to see in advance what the most likely responses are, uh, which are the most interesting and which provide something that we already know, is also very beneficial when developing ideas for future news articles.
Production: PRNEWS
