How Rehearsals Outperforms Commercial LLMs, Synthetic Personas, and Traditional User Research Methods
Rehearsals provides cutting edge behavior science to unlock a new AI powered persona that is incredibly close to ground truth than ever before. Our AI replicas pave the way for introducing a completely new way to conduct user research, customer research, product testing, and ad analysis.
How Marketing Teams make Decisions Yesterday
Traditional user research with Human Interviews are extremely time consuming and costly, and won't allow the flexibility of scale and ask.
Incredibly Expensive: Interviewing 100 people with traditional market research avenues has a floor of around $20,000, ranging to high six figures for full-service consultants.
Time-Consuming: Between planning study questions, recruiting a panel of participants, interviewing, calculating results, re-testing, and final output, user research from start to finish on average takes 4–12 weeks.
Limited Casual Inference: Traditional interview-based research lacks counterfactual controls – you can't A/B test a pricing strategy against a control group in a live interview.
Lack of Scale and Repeatability: Unable to repeat or iterate on the study in the same environment due to cost, time, and bias.
Subject to Bias: In person human testing is subject to psychological biases such as response bias and social desirability effects.
Stated purchase intent explains only 5–15% of the variance in actual CPG buying behavior (Morwitz et al., 2007). Consumers routinely overstate intent by 2–5x relative to actual trial rates (Jamieson & Bass, 1989), and the mere act of surveying them inflates the observed correlation — meaning even validation studies overstate how well surveys perform (Chandon, Morwitz & Reinartz, 2005).
The remaining 85–95% of behavioral variance is driven by factors invisible to stated-preference methods: habitual repertoire switching, shelf placement, package salience, and subconscious brand availability. The average consumer spends ~13 seconds choosing a brand in-store (Ehrenberg-Bass, 2018). This is a structural limitation of asking people to introspect on decisions they don't consciously make.
Are your Replicas Synthetic Personas?
No, Rehearsals are strictly distinct from Synthetic Personas. We introduce a unique methodology to get the rich social and cultural context that shapes an individual's decision-making process. We are AI Replicas powered by deep research on behavior to emulate human taste, something that will never be captured by Synthetic Personas.
Why? Because Synthetic Personas rely on demographic stereotypical outcomes rather than individual behavior and context. While they might identify demographic patterns, synthetic personas can never explain why a person might have a preference. This makes Synthetic Personas trivially persuadable under follow-up questions, and unreliable in simulated negotiations or trade-off scenarios.
Plus, Synthetic Personas fundamentally miss the unique edge-case preferences that make your customers who they are.
| Example: Cohort Synthetic Persona | Example: Individual Synthetic Personas | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical Input | “You are a male from Utah, who has a job in tech and makes over $100,000 with 2 children” | “You are John Doe, these are posts from your recent LinkedIn. Pretend to be them.” |
| Outcome | This can only ever generate high level generalizations and stereotypes of their demographic. | “John Doe” does not know why or how these posts were made. |
Why using ChatGPT, Gemini, and other Frontier LLMs will always fall short
Aside from the fact that these large language models do not have the context of your customers, Frontier LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini use deductive reasoning from first principles and aggregate training data, grossly relying towards mean responses.
Rehearsals shines in capturing demographic diversity, celebrating the real human niche communities that move quickly as trends change rapidly ever before.
Our Replicas are able to predict winning social media content and video advertising content over 30% better than frontier AI models.
Explore your business with Rehearsals
Want to try our tool? Book a demo with us to play with Rehearsals. Ask it anything with any cohort in mind.