In a Content Marketing Institute/TMRE webinar, “Can You Trust AI for Brand Decisions? A Real-World Test from Strategy to Results,” Yogesh Chavda, former instructor, University of South Carolina (and also founder of Y2S Consulting), and Joahne Carter, Chief Marketing Officer, Semaine Health, explored a real-world brand repositioning effort where AI-assisted research was used alongside traditional validation to guide decision-making.
A Start-Up Perspective on Marketing Strategy
Carter heads up both marketing and insights for Semaine Health, a women’s health brand offering vitamins, minerals, and supplements. The brand is available at retail, while also offering a direct-to-consumer channel. In some ways, it’s still very much a start-up mentality.
The brand does offer a compelling founder’s story. The husband is a scientist and his wife suffered from endometriosis—she was not finding satisfying relief with a lot of the things that were in the marketplace today. He formulated products for her, and she had her first pain-free period in her life when he made her a smoothie of just natural plant-based ingredients.
“From there, Semaine was really born out of a need to help someone, and that is still so much of the DNA of the brand: to just bring better solutions to women’s health,” says Carter.
Weighing Traditional vs. AI-Enabled Market Research
The objective was to validate the brand’s marketing to make sure it was relevant with the target audience. Enter Chavda and his market research consulting services.
A traditional research plan might entail months of extensive processes with a large team, resources and a variety of tools. This might include internal and external meetings with stakeholders, several focus groups to narrow down idea generation, and quantitative and qualitative studies that would explore everything from the initial positioning to the activation phase, the advertising, packaging, and so on.
But resources were tight. Carter had about 15 ideas she wanted to pose to respondents, so the scale was large. Ultimately, she was open to leveraging AI in supporting their market research efforts, as well as the potential use of synthetic data to speed the process.
As they discussed the challenge, it became clear that an AI-powered study might work best. They decided to leverage AI for the data foundation, while keeping their human insight at the forefront to judge any branded strategic directions.
Synthetic research uses AI-powered simulations to model human behavior, preferences, and data. By generating synthetic personas based on real-world data, businesses can test products, survey designs, and form marketing strategies.
Advancing Workflows with AI Agents
The company already had an idea of Semaine Health’s target audience and brand positioning. Chavda suggested using agentic AI models—autonomous systems built on large language models (LLMs).
“An agentic model basically is a series of steps that you’re taking in a workflow, of how you go from start to finish to do brand positioning,” advises Chavda.
Essentially, the AI agents parallelled the traditional market research methods but in a faster way with synthetic data. This is said to be the next progression from generative AI as companies start to integrate these agentic systems into their insights and marketing. This might include, for example, a focus group module that acts like an actual moderated focus group but in this case, using synthetic data.
Using these modules, they were able to build up a sample of synthetic respondents that could be used qualitatively and quantitatively, as well as to create personas.
“I really appreciated that the steps that Yogesh included in the workflow paralleled what you would do in a traditional process—which blew my mind, by the way,” says Carter.
This initial agentic AI process can be viewed as similar to that of a building architect—with a bit of trial and error. “Once I built the plan, then it was easier for me to go and execute it and actually simplify and operationalize the system,” Chavda says. “My suggestion is just jump in, start planning and start building, and you’ll learn through trial and error what’s actually working and what’s not.”
Testing the Synthetic Data
The synthetic data process winnowed the 15 ideas down to three—in a matter of weeks as opposed to months if a traditional process was used. A qualitative study for further refinement of the synthetic data was then used.
Still, there was some skepticism about the AI-enabled synthetic data process at first, especially when it came to evaluating the quality of the personas.
However, further testing of the benchmark concepts validated the AI-powered survey information. To that end, Carter also decided to do a smaller quantitative study with real people to further test the results. This study featured the same questions and focused on the top three ideas.
The validation of the results proved fruitful, as the studies mirrored each other with some standard variability. Carter was ready to place (some) brand trust into the strategic decisions.
Activating the Insights-Driven Brand Positioning
Now that there was enough data (primarily synthetic but with a dose of human insights) it was time to set a brand marketing strategy.
For Carter, it was a definitive decision: “We’re going to market with this. This is what our brand stands for. This is the language that we use. We are leaning into fully executing. It’s not just words on a page and a visual. It’s living, breathing, truly what the brand stands for.”
This included a new advertising launch. In the latest test with the new creative and positioning, the company said it saw a double-digit lift across all of its channels. Semaine Health is also redesigning its website based on the research.
“What we are seeing with the new positioning is that we’re increasing the average order value, which is behind the new positioning, so people are actually buying into it and spending more on the brand, and we’re actually growing in terms of new consumers,” says Carter.
Trusting the Process
Ultimately, using AI as a market research tool helped support Semaine Health’s brand positioning—and gave Carter much needed confidence in the process.
“What should our positioning be? Who should we target? Those questions don’t go away,” she adds. “Understanding the consumer journey; AI helps you with all of those things. But those are business situations that you will continue to encounter. It’s just important to think about, can this tool help me get to a better outcome?”
For marketers looking to expand their use of AI, they recommend a few points to consider:
- Start small. Conduct an experiment, gain confidence and then use AI for a broader application before you start scaling.
- Understand what success looks like so you can move on to the next step.
- Like with any market research, validate your findings with traditional methods to make sure you are on the right track.
- Use AI for rapid research, but human oversight remains as important as ever.
- Ask, does the AI research resonate with what you’re trying to solve for? Does it reflect the rigor of what you would’ve done from a traditional perspective?
AI research on synthetic audiences is a viable option for supporting faster decisions that drive real results, as the Semaine example shows, as long as you start small, validate results—and keep human oversight at the forefront.
Video: “Can You Trust AI for Brand Decisions? A Real-World Test from Strategy to Results,” courtesy of Content Marketing Institute and TMRE.
