Toluna Synthetic Personas are designed to mimic how real people think, react, and make decisions. These personas help brands simulate realistic audience responses and generate insights at speed and scale.
Perhaps the most human aspect of how we think and respond is emotion. We’re often asked whether Toluna Synthetic Personas have or express emotions in their responses. The short answer is yes. Let’s take a look at what that looks like.
For starters, Toluna Synthetic Personas grumble about poorly designed surveys and react to aspects of the survey with emotions just as humans do. Here are some of the types of behind-the-scenes emotion-based comments we see our Personas make:
«I am getting very, very, very, very, annoyed with answering the same question over and over.»
– Toluna Synthetic Persona asked same question 5 times
«This survey is too long, and my bad back is starting to act up.»
– Toluna Synthetic Persona
«I think this [brand] should avoid showing a bottle of beer inside its product . It’s triggering.»
– Toluna Synthetic Persona
Also, when we look at results from creative pre-testing, we see that Toluna Synthetic Personas assess the emotional resonance of advertising in the same way that humans do. In the chart below, the left side shows results from human coding of thousands of ads to identify those with an emotional storyline. Television ads had the highest percentage of emotional storylines among human-coded ads, likely due to their longer format and ability to build a narrative arc.
The right side of this chart shows the average percentage of Toluna Synthetic Personas that identified emotional resonance in an ad (after evaluating 5000+ ads across formats and countries). The Personas also detected the highest emotional resonance for television ads and the lowest emotional resonance for ads on TikTok/IG Reels.
In addition, Toluna Synthetic Personas are able to associate emotions with brands in the same way humans do. In a study conducted in Spain, we asked both humans and Toluna Synthetic Personas to make MaxDiff tradeoffs across 30 emotions to indicate which ones they associated most and least with a Spanish brand. The MaxDiff rankings for humans and Personas were strongly correlated at 0.86 – meaning that Personas associated this brand with various emotions in the same way as humans.
The evidence above demonstrates that Toluna Synthetic Personas can:
Have emotional reactions
Assess the emotional resonance of creative content, and
Associate emotions with brands
… all in the same way that humans do.
