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Methodology · BuyerLens

Know why they hesitated, before the next cut.

BuyerLens is a synthetic buyer interview engine. Run a structured panel of 5–15 personas against your creative or concept, surface the specific resistance, and decide which objection to remove next.

5 minper 10-persona panel
12frozen interview spines
~85%tag inter-rater agreement
Live panel · in progress
Why didn't this convert?
10 personasDTC haircare · US · Gen-Z
MMaya · 26 · Skeptic
JJordan · 24 · Fan
AAisha · 31 · Curious
+77 more
What stops you from buying after watching this ad?
Maya: I don't see what's actually in the bottle. Three influencers, zero ingredients. Trust gap
Aisha: Price isn't on screen. If it's over $40 I'm out, and the framing screams $50. Price uncertainty
Dominant resistance
Trust gap · 6/10
Verdict
Tension
The qualitative gap

The score tells you how strong. The interviews tell you why not.

RoastIQ predicts how an ad will perform. BuyerLens predicts the specific reason a real buyer would hesitate, the line, the missing reassurance, the wrong reference point.

Synthetic interviews are not a real consumer panel. They are scenario simulation, structured against the same persona dimensions Kantar uses, and validated by inter-rater agreement against real interviews. We are explicit about both ends.

  • Old way · Survey
    Recruit, screen, field, code
    $8k–$40k. 3–6 weeks per round.
  • Old way · Focus group
    8 people, 90 minutes
    One room, one moderator, one narrative.
  • Now · BuyerLens
    10-persona synthetic panel
    5 minutes. Tagged resistance, not a transcript.
  • After launch
    In-market validation
    Real signal closes the loop, on a smaller bet.
How BuyerLens thinks

From one brief to a tagged resistance map, in four passes.

A frozen interview spine, a structured persona panel, deterministic tagging. The interviewer changes nothing about the question. Only the audience changes.

Step 01

Set the brief

Define the audience (category, region, life stage), pick the interview spine (Conversion, Resistance, Concept, Pricing, Switch), upload the creative or paste the concept. That's the entire input.

Step 02

Build the persona panel

5–15 personas drawn from a pre-built persona library, balanced across role, life stage, brand familiarity, price sensitivity, and category fluency. Each persona is a frozen JSON spec, not a re-rolled prompt.

Step 03

Run the interview spine

The same 6–10 questions per spine, in the same order, against every persona. No model creativity on the question side, that's how the same answer means the same thing twice.

Step 04

Tag the resistance

Each answer gets coded to a frozen taxonomy: Trust gap, Price uncertainty, Wrong reference, Missing proof, Format friction, and so on. The output is a resistance map with frequencies, not a wall of quotes.

Synthetic panel · scenario simulation
DTC haircare · Gen-Z · Resistance spine
10 personasSpine v3 · frozen
CategoryDTC haircare, US, $30–$50 segment
AudienceGen-Z (22–28), curly + textured hair
SpineResistance · 8 questions · frozen v3
Stimulusholidays_are_coming.mp4 · 60s
M
Maya · Skeptic
26 · low brand fluency
high price sensitivity
J
Jordan · Fan
24 · high category fluency
medium price sensitivity
A
Aisha · Curious
31 · medium brand fluency
high price sensitivity
R
Riya · Switcher
28 · loyal to a competitor
medium price sensitivity
D
Diana · Lapsed
25 · bought once, churned
high price sensitivity
+5
+5 personas
Balanced across the
same five axes
Q3 · What stops you from buying after watching this?
Maya: No ingredients, three influencers. I don't trust it yet.
Aisha: Price is invisible. The framing makes me assume $50.
Q4 · What would change your mind?
Riya: One real review from someone with my texture, not a paid creator.
Resistance map
Tension
Dominant resistance: Trust gap (6/10), secondary: Price uncertainty (4/10). Three personas would convert with a single visible price + one non-paid review on screen.
FROZEN TAXONOMY · 11 TAGS · v3
The persona dimensions

Five axes. Balanced panels. One resistance map.

Each panel is balanced across the same five persona axes, so a 10-persona run is not 10 versions of the same person. The axes are frozen, panel composition is reproducible.

Role & life stage
22%
Category fluency
22%
Brand familiarity
20%
Price sensitivity
20%
Switch posture
16%
A panel is balanced if its 10 personas span at least three states per axis: low / medium / high category fluency, low / medium / high price sensitivity, and so on. The five interview spines (Conversion · Resistance · Concept · Pricing · Switch) ask the same questions in the same order, every time, so two runs on the same brief return the same tag distribution within ±1 hit per tag.
The decision

Three resistance states. One ladder. One next move.

Every BuyerLens panel lands on exactly one of these. The rule is mechanical.

dominant tag ≤ 2/10 · no tag ≥ 5
Convert
No single resistance is loud enough to block the panel. The ad is doing the work; remaining objections are scatter, not signal.
Action. Ship. Watch in-market for the same tags to confirm they stay quiet.
dominant tag 3–5/10
Tension
A real, fixable objection is the main thing standing between half the panel and a yes. Often a missing price, missing proof, or wrong reference.
Action. One edit. Re-run the same spine. Watch the dominant tag fall.
dominant tag ≥ 6/10 · or two+ tags ≥ 4
Block
The concept is fighting the audience, not just a detail. Tweaking the cut won't move the dominant tag below the threshold.
Action. Re-brief the concept, not the edit. The interview tells you which axis the brief mis-read.
Validation

Synthetic, but reproducible. Here's how we keep it honest.

Two runs on the same brief should return the same resistance map within tolerance, and the tags we generate should agree with what a trained human coder writes down. We measure both.

0%
Tag agreement vs. human coders (n=180 answers, blind-rated)
0.00
Run-to-run reliability · Krippendorff's α on tag distribution
0
Tags in the frozen resistance taxonomy
0
Frozen interview spines · same questions, same order
What this means in plain English. When the same brief is run twice, the two resistance maps overlap on roughly 9 of every 10 tag hits. When a trained human codes the same panel transcript, they assign the same tag we did about 85% of the time, the disagreements are mostly on the borderline between "Trust gap" and "Missing proof". What this is not. Not a substitute for a real consumer panel. Not a recall measurement. Not a predictor of in-market sales lift, the tags surface resistance, they don't quantify revenue.
Honest scope

What BuyerLens is, and what it isn't.

Synthetic interviews work because they are reproducible and structured. They fail when they are read as a real panel. We are explicit about which is which.

BuyerLens does

  • Run a balanced, frozen-persona panel against your creative or concept.
  • Apply the same five interview spines in the same order, every run.
  • Tag every answer to an 11-tag resistance taxonomy with ~85% human agreement.
  • Return a resistance map, dominant tag, and one mechanical verdict (Convert / Tension / Block).
  • Re-run on demand against a single edit, so you can watch the dominant tag fall.

BuyerLens does not

  • Run a real consumer panel, every persona is a frozen scenario spec, not a human.
  • Measure brand recall, that requires recall-survey methodology.
  • Predict sales lift, ROAS, or attributed conversion.
  • Generate creative ideas, the spine asks, it doesn't author the answer for the brand.
  • Replace post-launch listening. The map runs before the spend, not instead of it.

Hear the panel before you re-brief.

Upload the cut, pick the spine, get the tagged resistance map in five minutes. Decide which objection to remove next, not whether one exists.