Persona profiles

How a profile is built

When you create a population, the fields for each persona are sampled in a fixed order, and each field depends on the ones before it: first age and gender, then education, marital status, work status, city, household structure, lifestyle, income group and the rest. This keeps the fields consistent with each other; for example, a persona’s education and work status fit their age. The filters and ratios you choose constrain this sampling. When you leave a field as All, the distribution for Türkiye is used.

You can rename or delete a population in the library, but there is no screen for editing persona profiles. When you use the same population in a new study, the same personas respond. If you create a new population with the same filters, the personas are sampled again, so the two populations are never exactly the same. For the sampling method, see How synthetic consumers work.

Profile fields

In the table, “profile card” is the card that opens when you hover over a participant card in the Real-Time Focus Group method. “Excel” is the file you download with the Download Excel button on the population page; the column name in the file is given in brackets.

SES and income group

SES (socio-economic status) is calculated from the sum of the points given for the persona’s income group, education and work status. A total of 76 or more gives class A, 62 or more B, 48 or more C1, 35 or more C2, 29 or more D, and anything lower E. The SES_Score column in the Excel file shows this total. Income group, by contrast, is a separate field from SES: one of ten income bands, from A1 to E2. When you create a population, you filter by SES, not by income group.

Household budget

Each persona has a monthly household budget, calculated at current prices from their income group and TurkStat income distribution data: household income, essential spending and discretionary spending. In methods with price questions, such as Price Analysis (WTP), the budget is used to describe the persona’s financial situation; it is not given to the persona as a spending cap. The budget is not shown on screens or in downloaded files.

Personality and behavioural tendencies

Each persona has five personality scores based on the Big Five personality model (OCEAN): openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Scores are on a 1–10 scale and are sampled so that they relate to the persona’s lifestyle. Personality scores are not shown on screens or in Excel files. In focus groups, the Joint Composition strategy also takes the variety of these scores into account when it chooses participants.

Behavioural tendencies are six shopping tendencies that are not tied to any particular product. Scores are scaled to a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10 across Türkiye; a score above 50 is above the Türkiye average.

In the Dynamic Conjoint type of the Competitive Analysis (Conjoint) method, the report splits these tendencies into Low (<45), Typical (45–55) and High (>55) groups, which you can examine as segments. In the Excel file of Fashion and Ad Testing populations, the tendencies appear as scores in the PVC, QBO, DEA, NOV, HED and POP columns.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle is one of five classes based on the persona’s values, such as Çalışkan İyimser (Industrious Optimist). The classes are derived from value measures in the World Values Survey data for Türkiye, such as views on technology, trust in people and institutions, belonging and attitudes to work. Lifestyle appears in the Lifestyle column of the population’s Excel file; it has no chart on the Population Detail page and cannot be chosen as a filter. You may see different class names in populations created earlier.

The Lifestyle tab in the population form is not related to this class; it holds the alcohol, smoking, household size and car/home ownership filters.

Market segment

The segmentation you accept when creating a population assigns each persona to a market segment based on their attributes. The segment appears in the Market Segment Distribution chart (up to six segments), on focus group cards and in the Excel file. In General Research populations, personas without a segment are not counted in this chart; if no persona has a segment, the chart is not shown. Creating a population explains how the segmentation is found.

Vertical-specific fields and archetypes

Fashion and Ad Testing population profiles also include vertical-specific fields. In the population form, you set the distributions of Primary Shopping Channel and Style Confidence for Fashion, and of Kategori İlgilenimi (Category Involvement) and Reklama Açıklık (Ad receptivity) for Ad Testing. Personas are also assigned a vertical-specific consumer type, an archetype: in Fashion, a fashion shopper archetype while the study runs; in Ad Testing, a viewer archetype after the population is created. This is why the Distribution method card on the Population Detail page of Ad Testing populations reads Archetype-based distribution. Archetypes appear in the Fashion Comparison and Multiple-Choice Survey reports and in the Ad Test report; for details, see Verticals.

Custom feature

A custom feature is a short sentence that you write on the Custom Feature tab when creating a population and that is given to the percentage of personas you specify (e.g. “Prefers eco-friendly products”). Each persona carries at most one custom feature, and the language model reads it as a fixed part of the persona’s identity. For setup, distribution and where it appears in reports, see Custom features.

Profile text

The fields are turned into a short narrative text using templates. The text combines a demographic summary, the custom feature if there is one, the description of the market segment, short inferences about purchasing behaviour, digital and financial habits, and a summary of personality and lifestyle. During the study, the language model gets to know the persona from this text. The profile text is not shown on screens or in downloaded files.

Where you see profiles

In the charts on the Population Detail page, each bar shows both the number of people (such as “46 of 200 people”) and the percentage. The percentage is the share of all personas that fall in that category; the Market Segment Distribution chart in General Research populations is the only exception. The Population library page covers all the library screens.

In a focus group, participant cards show the persona’s name, market segment, SES and income group. The profile card that opens when you hover over a card also shows age group, gender, city, education and marital status. If this information is stored for the persona, the Purchasing Behavior and Custom Feature rows appear too. The same card also opens from the Participants list on the left during the session.

Segment breakdowns in the Price Analysis, Feature Price Impact, Priority Ranking and Competitive Analysis reports are based on profile fields such as age, gender, education, income group, SES and market segment; some reports also offer the custom feature or behavioural tendencies as breakdowns. The Segmentation page explains how to read breakdowns.

Using profiles

Checking a population

Before you start a study, check that the population matches your target audience.

1. In the sidebar, open LIBRARY › Populations.
2. Click the population’s card.
3. Check the number of personas on the Person Count card.
4. Compare the Gender Distribution, Age Distribution, Market Segment Distribution and SES Distribution charts with your target audience.
5. To inspect personas one by one, click Download Excel.
6. Filter the downloaded file by column.

If the distribution is not what you expected, create a new population with different filters and ratios; see Filters and attributes for the options. Very narrow or conflicting filters can produce fewer personas than requested, or cause a filter to be relaxed for some personas. You can see this in the charts and in the number of rows in the Excel file.

Choosing focus group participants

You can choose up to 20 participants for a focus group. On the Participant Selection screen, you use profiles in two ways:

• Smart Selection strategies choose participants by profile field. By Segment, By Age, By Gender and By Income balance the groups; Joint Composition balances the age, gender and income distribution together with variety in personality scores. Random selection ignores profiles.
• With Manual Selection, hover over the cards, read the profile card and choose participants one at a time.

When you choose the Joint Composition strategy, the Achieved composition box that opens compares the selected group (Group) with the candidate pool (Pool). The rows it compares include Holds a credit card and Shops online. For details of the method, see Real-Time Focus Group.

Reading reasoning in reports

Some methods show personas’ responses together with their reasoning. Read each piece of reasoning alongside the profile of the persona who wrote it, so you can see which group a view comes from.

• Comparison: the Voice of the consumer section groups the reasoning of personas who did and did not choose the product into themes. In the Persona details section, each row is a persona: persona number, archetype or segment, preference and scores. Narrow the list with the Archetype or Segment and Preference filters; open a row to read the Reasoning and Choice reasoning text.
• Ad Test: the Persona Sesleri (Persona Voices) cards give the words of the personas who liked the ad most and least, together with their archetype, age group, gender and income group.
• Focus group: each response in the conversation appears with the participant’s name; to see the profile card, hover over the name in the list on the left. In the analysis, the Kümeler (Clusters) tab groups participants with similar views, and the Custom Feature tab groups participants and responses by custom feature.

The Multiple-Choice Survey does not collect reasoning; it records only the choice. For this method and the price methods, use the Population and Raw sheets in the study’s Excel file together to see who gave which answer.

Tips

• In the charts, the Unknown label shows personas that have no value for that field.
• If you plan to compare the results of two studies, run both on the same population. Because the personas stay the same, the difference between the results does not come from a difference in population.
• The Excel file on the population page is a short demographic list. For the custom feature and responses, use the study’s own Excel file.
• Fashion and Ad Testing populations have no marital status or household size charts; for these populations, look at the archetype and vertical fields instead.

Related pages

• Population library
• Filters and attributes
• Custom features
• Real-Time Focus Group
• How synthetic consumers work