Take this guy: 62 years old, lives in middle England, mortgage paid off on a four-bed detached, three kids flown the nest, drives a VW, shops at Waitrose, used to be a golf club member.
That’s the standard profile. Looks neat, ticks the boxes, qualifies for research. But here’s the thing—it tells you almost nothing about him. Humans aren’t boxes. We’re emotional, irrational, contradictory. This is relevant to segmenting markets and targeting, failure for online research to understand context and for the current hot topic, the use of synthetic respondents and data.
With ‘synthetic; in the clamour for faster and cheaper insight, hard to find ‘audiences’, synthetic respondents have emerged – AI-generated personas built from large datasets to mimic how consumers might behave or answer. They promise scale, speed, to fill the gaps, generate insight and cost efficiency. But here’s the problem: synthetic respondents don’t live life. They don’t hold grudges, cry at goals or feel elated when their kid passes a tricky exam. At best, they’re an approximation, a statistical shadow of human behaviour. At worst, they reinforce bias, erase unpredictability and give a false sense of certainty.
So who is this 62 year old guy really?
He’s a late-70s, 80s music kid who never had a mohawk but still blasts Stiff Little Fingers while cooking on a Friday night, sneaks off with his daughter to see Sam Fender, and lets his son drag him into Dropkick Murphys. He’s a football fan whose politics were permanently shaped by ‘Hillsborough’—anti-establishment, left-leaning, and fiercely protective of truth. He travels with curiosity, trusting strangers, learning from scrapes and adventures that shape how he sees the world.
Food? For him it’s about social connection. Raised on the ‘joy’ of occasionally eating out at Berni’s, he now hunts down street food with joy, loathes dull chain restaurants, and cooks creatively at home. He’s a voracious reader, driven by the humility of knowing how much he doesn’t know—serious at times, but always hungry for facts and perspective.
And like many who’ve done alright, he’s sceptical of being sold to. He resists mindless consumerism. He’ll invest in what feels meaningful, but if you’re flogging the latest phone or jeans, forget it. What he values now matters more than what he owns.
Oh, and football. That irrational obsession where logic collapses. At five years old, Alan Ball lit a fire in him. Everton became his tribe, Liverpool his spiritual home, red his personal enemy. Coke can try, but he’ll never drink from that can. Football isn’t just sport – it’s identity links with politics, community, loyalty and even spending power.
So yes, you can profile him. You can even try to simulate him with an algorithm. But you’ll miss the man. You’ll miss the tribes he belongs to, the irrationalities that drive him, the passions that shape his choices.
And if you haven’t guessed, that man is me. You only find that out through a real conversation – by listening, asking, digging into context, values, and stories.
At ConversationPartners.AI, we use technology to enable better conversations, not to replace them. Synthetic respondents may give you speed and scale, but they’ll never give you the raw human truth. To understand customers, you need to talk to them. Really talk and listen to them.
Real conversations with real people. That’s where the truth lives.
If you’d like to explore how this approach can unlock deeper, more valuable consumer insight, message me here or at andyd@conversationpartners.ai.
