How to test messaging on personas

A persona from Hiasynth is one synthetic household, drawn from the population that matches your audience in your place. Its members, income, rent, commute and values all come from the same generated record, so they fit together the way a real household's do. This guide shows how to draw one and put it to work. Each persona is one call to sample_persona, for 3 credits.

Ask for a persona

Name the audience and the place, as narrow or as wide as you like: "families with young children in Bavaria who own an electric car", or simply "people in Porto".

Give me a persona for people aged 30 to 45 in the top income quartile in Bavaria.

For a second voice, ask again. A different seed draws a different household from the same audience. For a deliberate contrast, change the audience: renters against owners, or under and over 40.

Read what came back

The household. Who lives there, their ages, how many adults work, and how many households in the place this one stands for.
Money. Net income a month, housing costs, what is left after them, and how much of a reserve the household has, in local currency.
Pressure. How stretched the budget is, and how pressed for time: the longest commute, small children at home.
The home and the shops. Tenure, dwelling type and size, the grocery stores within reach, whether the household shops by car, and how much food it buys online.
The year ahead. The chances of moving, a birth, retiring or losing a job in the next twelve months.
The main person. Education, income quartile, the values that set them apart, their media diet, paid subscriptions and brand affinities.

Anything the population does not hold for that household is listed as unknown, so your assistant can leave it out instead of inventing it.

Put them to work

Ask your assistant to stay in character and react:

Take this persona. Read this landing page as them and tell me where you stop reading, and why.

Here are three subject lines. Which would this household open? Answer in their voice.

As this persona, what would make you distrust this offer?

Your assistant does the role-play. Hiasynth supplied the facts that keep it honest: what this household earns, pays, has left over and cares about.

Going further

Pair it with the reach profile. Plan reaching an audience tells you which values to lead with across the whole audience. A persona tells you how that lands in one household's life.

Draw several. Three or four households from the same audience show its range. When they come back close to each other, the audience is uniform, which is itself worth knowing.

Compare places. The same audience in Milan and in Naples gives different personas. Useful when one creative has to work across markets.

A small panel. Draw personas from three or four audiences, keep them in the conversation, and run every draft past all of them. It doesn't replace research with real people, but it removes the obvious misses before you pay for that research.

Worth knowing

A persona is synthetic. One household generated with the rest of the population, from the public record. Nobody real lives there.
It is placed only as precisely as you asked. Draw it from a city and it lives in that city. It is never given a street or a neighbourhood finer than the place you named.
It needs people behind it. At least 100 matching people in the place, and 1,000 for a radius or an area smaller than a municipality. The answer tells you when to widen.
For "how many", size the market. A persona is one household from the audience. The count belongs to analyze_market.
What it says in character is your assistant's. The facts are from the population. The voice, the objections and the reactions are a language model reasoning from those facts. Treat them as a well-briefed colleague's guess and not as a survey result.

That is the whole loop: size it, choose where, understand the place, plan the reach, test the message. When an answer surprises you, Reading an answer explains every number in it.