Introducing PersonaLAB™ by Media Logic
Marketers have used buyer personas for decades, but most are static and trapped in a slide deck. What if personas could talk back? What if you could ask them anything, any time, even at 11 p.m. the night before a big meeting?
That question was the inspiration behind Media Logic’s PersonaLAB™, a new strategic tool that brings buyer personas to life to guide creative and messaging development, shape media targeting and enable sales teams.
The Problem with Traditional Personas
Many marketers have been in the room for a persona reveal: months of research distilled into a polished deck and presented to a team eager to put it to work. Those insights go on to shape the strategy and creative that follow, which is exactly what they’re built to do.
The challenge comes after. Busy sales and marketing teams juggle a dozen responsibilities a day, and holding the full depth of persona research in mind through all of them is a lot to ask of anyone. The answers are in the deck, but stopping to dig through slides in the middle of a busy day is a step that’s easy to skip.
Meet PersonaLAB
PersonaLAB is designed to solve that problem. It turns persona research, including work you’ve already invested in, into interactive personas your team can simply ask in the moment, in plain language, about the question in front of them. When new information becomes available, it can be layered onto what’s already there. That includes fresh survey data, campaign results, and market changes.
“PersonaLAB brings to life the investments that people have already made in developing personas,” says Media Logic Founder and CEO David Schultz.
PersonaLAB’s interface synthesizes primary research and allows us to speak to personas through a web-based interface as if they were real people. This interactive format opens the door to deep, meaningful conversations, and even just quick, simple questions that offer insights far beyond a plain description or list of bullet points.
“Think about PersonaLAB as a voice-of-customer gut check,” says Media Logic Group Director Matt Morano, who has helped spearhead the development of the tool. “We’re trying to go much, much deeper to really understand who these people are that we’re talking to and what’s really going to motivate them to change attitudes and behaviors. We want to understand who they are in a really rich way.”
At its core, PersonaLAB allows us to upload deep data, research and target segmentation information, and then have a dialogue with the personas. Through those conversations, we’re able to test messaging, strategies, media channels, creative, claims and more. We can ask things like, does this campaign concept land? Does this messaging feel off? How would this audience react to a product idea we’re weighing? We can upload creative and ask for their response to it.
The biggest advantage of PersonaLAB isn’t that it’s faster or less expensive than commissioning a full research study, though it often is. It’s that PersonaLAB is always on, 24/7.
“When you have that one single question,” Morano says, “you’re not going to spend the money to do a gigantic research study. But to be able to just get a little reality check and ask people who resemble your audience a question like that is really powerful. PersonaLAB gives you the ability, in a 24/7, always-on-platform, to be able to pick the brain of a synthetic being that essentially can reflect the broader attitudes, mindset and behavior of your audience.”
PersonaLAB’s personas don’t exist within bubbles, either. Depending on the question, we can talk to a single persona one-on-one, the way you’d run an individual interview, or bring several into the same conversation and let them respond to each other the way a group would, bouncing ideas, thoughts and reactions off one another.
PersonaLAB can also support sales enablement, letting a team member test positioning and talking points against a persona before walking into a client conversation. Picture a foodservice sales rep with several meetings tomorrow and a new gluten-free pizza dough to introduce. The rep already knows these accounts: the independent pizzeria owner who’s always looking for something new to put on the menu, the regional chain buyer focused on cost and consistency and the café owner fielding more and more dietary requests. Each one lines up with a persona. Before heading out, the rep can ask each persona how it would react to the new dough, what would make it worth trying, and what objections are likely to come up. The result is a more focused and relevant approach for every meeting. For the regional chain, the rep will likely meet only the buyer. The rep can still ask the chain’s culinary, procurement and operations personas how they’d react, then walk in ready to help the buyer answer the questions coming from colleagues the rep will never meet.
Built on Research, Not a Replacement for It
It’s important to note that, like all other personas, PersonaLAB is only as strong as the research behind it. The best personas draw on primary research, client data and feedback and competitive landscape work, the same rigorous inputs that have always gone into a well-built persona. It’s an extension of the client’s research investment, not a shortcut around it. To be clear, PersonaLAB is directional, not statistically projectable. It keeps the customer’s voice in the room; it doesn’t replace quantitative research when a big decision calls for it. As part of our process, we collaborate with our clients on inputs, so that capabilities and limitations are clear from the start. Over time, we’re also mindful that, like all personas and marketing research, routine updating of inputs is required to keep the tool accurat
And, as with any source of insight, human or synthetic, we approach PersonaLAB’s answers with the same careful scrutiny we’d bring to any input. Every output is read and weighed by the Media Logic strategists and creatives who know the account, the category and the audience best, before it ever reaches a client. That layer of human critical thinking is what turns a quick, easy check into something trustworthy.
Looking ahead, this is only the beginning. The panel functionality already at work in PersonaLAB is laying the groundwork for a dedicated virtual focus group tool, one that keeps the same real-time, conversational format audiences respond to well.
See PersonaLAB in Action
Ready to understand your customers in a new way? Reach out to see how PersonaLAB can amplify your marketing strategy and help you get to know your target customers in a deeper, more meaningful way.
