Soltaros OÜ reports that static persona-building has lost much of its explanatory power in modern marketing — and outlines five research methods now outperforming personas across client engagements.
TALLINN, Estonia, June 5, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- For most of the past decade, persona-building was the default deliverable of audience research. Marketing teams commissioned segmentation studies, received three to five fictional buyer profiles, and used those profiles as a shared reference across creative and media planning. Based on Soltaros OÜ's findings, this technique was no longer deemed valuable by 2026. Consumers had become segmented into multiple media, consumer behavior was no longer linked with demographics, and there had been a reduction in the time between research and campaign planning, which did not suit the use of personas.
Soltaros has tracked this change across various projects in several markets. However, the trend has proven consistent with poor strategic decision-making by those organizations that continue to base their efforts on personas versus those using behavior-driven techniques.
What the Data Shows
Soltaros OÜ's observations point to five research methods now outperforming static personas across the engagements the company runs:
1. Behavioral cohort analysis. Audiences are grouped by what they actually do — first session length, return frequency, feature use — rather than by demographics. Soltaros tracks retention gaps of 30 to 50 percent between behavioral segments that appear identical on demographic grounds.
2. Intent-signal mapping. Search activity, consumption patterns, and interactions on a platform-specific level are analyzed to determine intent signals indicating that the audience is in motion, not just who comprises the audience.
3. Real-conversation mining. Language is extracted from support transcripts, community forums, and review platforms, giving creative teams the exact wording the audience uses rather than a sanitized persona quote.
4. Friction-observation studies. Frictions in user flows are observed rather than asking users why they did not complete a particular process. Behaviorally based frictions predict conversions better than self-reported frictions.
5. Cross-channel pattern tracking. The same cohort is analyzed across channels instead of analyzing each channel individually. Analysis on a cross-channel basis uncovers compounded behaviors that can't be captured in channel-by-channel analysis.
Soltaros stresses that these methods are not replacements for one another. Used together, they produce a continuously updated picture of the audience that personas were never designed to deliver.
Why Behavior-Led Research Changes the Outcome
In behavior-based research, audience comprehension is seen as a continuous process rather than just a one-off activity. The difference between a poster hung on a wall and a dashboard that the team sees each week is made clear.
According to Soltaros OÜ, teams that retire persona deliverables in favor of behavior-led methods see measurable improvements across several dimensions:
- Faster campaign decisions. Cohort and intent data are updated weekly; personas are not updated at all.
- Higher creative relevance. Real-conversation mining gives creative teams language that the audience already uses.
- More efficient media spend. Cross-channel tracking surfaces wasted overlap that single-channel reports cannot detect.
- Earlier detection of strategy drift. Friction studies surface mismatches between brand positioning and audience behavior before campaigns lock in.
Soltaros notes that the shift is not about discarding qualitative work. The Soltaros team treats qualitative interviews as a permanent input feeding the five methods above, rather than as the source of a static deliverable.
Soltaros OÜ's Position on the Issue
Soltaros OÜ does not argue that personas have zero value. The Soltaros team recognizes that personas still serve a coordination role for very early-stage brands without behavioral data to draw on. What has changed is the place personas occupy in a mature strategy: a starting reference, not a finished deliverable.
According to the Pew Research Center, about half of American adults use either Facebook or YouTube daily, while 24% use TikTok daily. Furthermore, there is a marked age gradient for all three sites, creating a persona representation that becomes increasingly lost. In like manner, the 2025 flash poll of Edelman Trust Institute reveals that trust calibration with regard to brands and institutions is much more differentiated by behavior and context than by demographics. Both observations corroborate Soltaros' position on how to address the challenge of client engagement.
Soltaros OÜ expects behavioral cohorts to replace demographic personas as the default reference object in marketing strategy over the next 12 to 24 months. The Soltaros team will continue to monitor how these methods perform across the markets in which it operates.
About Soltaros OÜ
Soltaros OÜ is an international marketing agency specializing in market research and content marketing for businesses across various countries. The company's core areas of work are market research and analytics, content marketing and SEO, digital and strategic marketing, and localization and translation. Soltaros OÜ helps brands expand into new markets, understand their audiences, and drive engagement through.
Media Contact
Laurel Modes, Soltaros OÜ, 372 53687277, [email protected], https://www.soltaros.com/
SOURCE Soltaros OÜ
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