Hakuhodo Launches AI Consumer Persona Platform Across 20 Countries
Hakuhodo's AI persona platform spans 20 countries, promising real-time consumer insights across Asia. Can virtual personas deliver cultural depth at speed?
Japanese advertising giant Hakuhodo has rolled out its Virtual Sei-katsu-sha platform globally, offering brands an AI-powered tool to generate virtual consumer personas across 20 countries and over 30 languages. The platform, which translates to "virtual living person," combines Hakuhodo's proprietary consumer research with generative AI to create personas that mirror real emotions, needs, and behaviors.
The launch addresses growing pressure on agencies to deliver faster consumer insights while maintaining cultural depth. Traditional research methods face constraints of time, location, and cost when brands need simultaneous feedback across multiple Asian markets.
Platform Capabilities and Early Adoption
The Virtual Sei-katsu-sha platform enables brands to generate and interact with diverse virtual personas representing different consumer types across regions. Unlike conventional user interviews, these AI-driven personas provide opinions and emotional responses through repeated interactions in both message-based and conversational formats.
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The solution supports multiple marketing functions including strategy development, product innovation, organizational design, and ideation workshops. Its interface can simulate discussions between multiple personas, offering deeper insights into how different consumer segments might respond to campaigns or products.
Japanese clients have already adopted the platform to test pre-market campaigns and creative concepts. Insights from the tool have informed campaign refinements and contributed to developing a B2C activation concept that evolved into a broader brand engagement platform, according to the company.
Speed Versus Depth in Asian Markets
The platform launch reflects broader industry tensions around research speed and cultural accuracy. Asian markets demand nuanced understanding of local consumer behavior, but brands increasingly need insights delivered in real-time rather than weeks or months.
Hakuhodo's approach combines its sei-katsu-sha research methodology, which views people holistically as living individuals rather than just consumers, with client data and marketing expertise. The AI layer generates personas that can respond authentically across cultural contexts, potentially addressing the speed-versus-depth challenge that has constrained traditional research firms.
Chief developer Shohei Kurita envisions eventually recreating all eight billion people as virtual sei-katsu-sha, enabling universal access to individual voices. Managing director Yusuke Miyabe emphasized viewing AI as "a partner in imagination" rather than merely an efficiency tool, aiming to address societal issues and create meaningful change.
Implications for Research Firms
The platform positions Hakuhodo at the forefront of what the company calls the "AI agent era," as agencies increasingly explore human-led generative AI applications beyond basic automation. The move signals competitive pressure on research firms to deliver both speed and scale without sacrificing the cultural understanding that Asian brands require.
The platform aims to help clients improve marketing efficiency while enabling agile decision-making and stronger brand experiences globally. Its availability across 20 countries suggests Hakuhodo expects demand for rapid, scalable consumer insights to extend beyond its traditional Japanese client base into broader Asian and global markets.
The launch comes as brands face mounting pressure to test campaigns and products across multiple markets simultaneously, a requirement that traditional research methodologies struggle to meet at the pace modern marketing demands.
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