Why Marketers are Swapping Vibes for Validated Traits
Instinct still rules marketing. But when deadlines are tight and signals are messy, instinct alone isn’t enough. That’s when bias creeps in, ideas launch untested, and opportunity gets left on the table. The remedy is to support your professional judgment, not sideline it, with a validated, academically-researched read on how people decide.
We believe HEXACO, a proven six-trait model developed by Canadian psychology professors Kibeom Lee and Michael C. Ashton, gives that read. Paired with the capabilities of AI to identify connections, analyze signals, and surface insights from an enormous amount of data, the framework creates realistic, predictive, human-driven models that bring clarity and confidence before going live, thereby validating your gut-instinct. Owing to this framework, Soulmates.ai becomes an audience research solution that positions your teams to shift from assumptions to assurances; to test, refine and build with confidence.
Publishers and agencies are already moving in this direction. Digiday reports that The Times is running “synthetic focus groups” built from its reader panel to pressure‑test choices like podcast naming before launch. In 2024, Guy Wood, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Sales practice identified “Digital Twins of the Customer”—defined as dynamic mirrors that simulate and anticipate behavior so teams can trial decisions before spend goes live—as “an engine of transformation and disruption.” WARC tracks the same trajectory, calling out digital twins as one of the AI breakthroughs reshaping planning, while Harvard Business Review has discussed how these human models are the key to faster, more predictive market research.
If the industry is going to lean on AI‑augmented audiences, the backbone matters. HEXACO is a strong fit because it predicts behavior in the places marketers care about while staying practical to field. The short form preserves predictive signal while keeping respondent burden low, which is why it works inside production timelines (Ashton and Lee, 2009). It also travels. A Journal of Personality paper finds the HEXACO‑60 structure holds across 18 countries, which lets global teams compare learning without moving the goalposts as a brief crosses markets (García et al., 2022).
HEXACO also plays well with the tools now embedded in research stacks. Recent work shows that steering model behavior with HEXACO‑based traits can reduce toxicity and bias across benchmarks, supporting the use of validated personality structure to keep systems aligned with human priorities instead of platform quirks (Wang et al., 2025). Separate studies recreate HEXACO experiments with agent populations and recover a coherent six‑factor pattern, suggesting a workable scaffold for digital twins meant to reflect how people think and decide, not just what they click (Mercer et al., 2025).
In practice, HEXACO’s a powerful foundation for augmenting instinct. It’s compact enough to run at campaign speed, stable enough to compare across markets, and structured enough to steer AI systems toward humanized outcomes. In an environment where CMOs are under pressure to show predictive lift from AI, the backbone matters as much as the interface. McKinsey’s latest survey finds high performers put guardrails around when to trust models and when to require human validation, which is exactly the posture that pairs instinct with proof rather than pitting them against each other (McKinsey, 2025).
Keeping the human in the loop means the difference between wanton, blind automation fed on synthetic data, and our solution: providing marketers with the ability to achieve 1:1 storytelling that reaches their brand’s most devoted core at the scale of mass-media.
This is where Soulmates.ai shines. With the application of validated psychographic methodologies, rigorous testing, and our decades of experience as marketing veterans for Fortune 500 clients, we’ve built 93 percent‑fidelity Brand Soulmates on a HEXACO backbone to preview how humans respond to tone, offers, stories, and strategies. It’s a practical way of transforming a deluge of data into actionable insights, extrapolating signals, intent, and behavior to augment ideation.
We recruit your fans from where your audience actually is, rigorously screen for fit and quality, then run a 300‑point study anchored by HEXACO‑60 plus brand‑specific behaviors. Our process also allows for capturing nuance at scale while eliminating moderator bias, including validating twins against holdout respondents until they clear the 93 percent fidelity bar. That way, your Brand Soulmates act and think like the people you need to reach.
Inside BrandOS, those high‑fidelity twins are complemented by our Foresight Engine to provide predictive confidence for your social creative and caption copy, analyzing historical social media performance to predict the impact of your work before it’s published. In addition, we expand your digital twins’ answerable domain with BYOD (Bring Your Own Data), allowing you to securely enrich twins with your CRM, past research, and performance logs.
We don’t believe our toolsets render instinct obsolete. But we do believe in the power of our platform to augment intuition, test gut‑instinct, and provide a simulacrum of behavior, experience, and expression that is indistinguishable from your audience.
Keep your instincts, but add a backbone. With a HEXACO‑grounded view of the audience, teams spot misses early, back strong ideas sooner, and make calls they can defend. It’s the Soulmates.ai mantra: Less Gut Feel. More Human Signal.