Question 1

What is Nonsumers?

Accepted Answer

Nonsumers is a collectible deck of 100 synthetic personas made by Early Studies, a UK cultural signals research company. Each card is the kind of consumer persona found in marketing briefs, PRDs and media buys, generated with synthetic audience methods and printed as a trading card.

Question 2

What are synthetic audiences?

Accepted Answer

Synthetic audiences are AI-generated stand-ins for real consumers. Language models trained on what people share online are prompted to act as a segment, answer surveys or react to ideas. They are quick and cheap to run, and they tend to return the idealised, performed version of people that exists online.

Question 3

Can synthetic personas replace consumer research?

Accepted Answer

Synthetic personas are useful for drafting hypotheses, testing wording and preparing fieldwork. When the question is why people behave the way they do, they drift towards the average and the stereotypes in their training data. Nonsumers collects 100 examples of that drift, one card at a time.

Question 4

How does Early Studies research audiences?

Accepted Answer

Early Studies uses AI every day, and talks to real people to understand people. Our social circle surveys ask people about those around them as well as themselves, and our triple tense questions ask what they believed before, what they believe now and what they expect next. Both are designed to get past performance and bias.

Question 5

Who is Nonsumers for?

Accepted Answer

Nonsumers is for brand, marketing, product, media and insight teams: anyone who writes briefs, builds personas or is choosing between synthetic audience tools and consumer research partners for audience and persona work.

Question 6

How do I get the cards?

Accepted Answer

Open a pack at nonsumers.com. Every pack holds ten random Nonsumers from a series of 100, across ten categories from Technology and Media to Beauty and Luxury.

Nonsumers: 100 synthetic personas from marketing briefs, as trading cards