Thank you to OneNorth for supporting the LMA Midwest Region!
Legal marketers face a persistent challenge: proving marketing’s impact in a world where key buyers rarely respond to surveys or interviews. When your audience consists of general counsel at Fortune 500 companies or CEOs of global enterprises, access to this kind of market research has long felt out of reach for legal CMOs— it’s too expensive, too slow, and frankly, too complex to justify. When you’re under pressure from partners to validate every dollar spent, it’s easy to deprioritize research in favor of more immediate tactics.
But here’s the irony: the very thing that could help you prove marketing’s value—brand health measurement—is often skipped. With the right data, you can track your firm’s awareness, trust, and differentiation over time. You can connect your efforts to long-term business outcomes. And you can start to shift the perception of marketing from a cost center to a strategic investment in the firm’s future.
However, getting in front of a large number of GCs and CEOs to survey them about your firm is next to impossible. So, how do you run quantitative market research when your audience is unreachable?
That’s where synthetic research enters the conversation.
What Is Synthetic Market Research?
Synthetic market research is a new frontier powered by generative AI. It creates AI-generated personas—digital twins—of your target audience by pulling from a vast array of publicly available data: social media, websites, earnings calls, academic papers, and more. These aren’t just generic composites. They’re statistically modeled to mirror the behaviors, preferences, and decision-making patterns of real people.
Think of it like digital twinning for marketing. Just as engineers create virtual replicas of machines to simulate performance, synthetic research builds virtual replicas of your buyers—so you can test messaging, segment audiences, and explore decision criteria without ever sending a survey.
Why This Matters for Legal Marketers
For legal marketers, access to senior buyers can be a limiting factor. The result? Brand measurement gets sidelined in favor of near-term tactics. Skipping research makes it harder to validate marketing spend, connect campaigns to business outcomes, or demonstrate marketing’s role in client development and firm growth.
Synthetic research removes those barriers. It allows you to:
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Understand how your firm is perceived by hard-to-reach audiences
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Test messages before going to market
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Map decision journeys and buying committees
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Build strategies based on data, not guesswork.
Is It Trustworthy?
That’s the million-dollar question. And the answer is: resoundingly, yes.
Our partner company in this space has tested just that. To date they’ve run over 80 head-to-head tests comparing synthetic research to traditional methods. These tests were double-blind and peer reviewed. The result? A 95% accuracy rate.
Is traditional research still the gold standard? Sure—if you can actually reach your audience. But when your buyers are elusive, synthetic research becomes not just a viable alternative, but a strategic advantage.
Why Synthetic Research Might Be Your Only Option
A marketer working with a highly specialized firm—one targeting four distinct, hard-to-reach audience segments—recently tried to run traditional market research. The results? It was going to take 8 to 12 weeks to gather just 150 responses. Not 150 per segment. 150 total. That’s barely enough to scratch the surface, let alone generate statistically valid insights. And after all that time and investment, the data wouldn’t be strong enough to confidently guide a campaign, shape messaging, or inform a strategic pivot.
Now imagine the cost of that delay. The opportunity lost while waiting. The risk of making decisions based on shaky data—or worse, no data at all.
In contrast, synthetic research delivered 1,000 responses in just seven days. That’s not just faster. It’s transformational. It means you can move at the speed of your business. You can test, learn, and adapt in real time. You can build strategies on a foundation of insight—not assumption.
A Smarter Path Forward
Synthetic research isn’t just a faster alternative. For legal marketers, it’s often the most practical way to understand your most important buyers. When your audience is hard to reach and the need for insight is growing, it offers a clear and accessible path forward. For CMOs and marketing leaders in B2B and professional services—where audiences are niche and access is limited—synthetic research may not just be the best option. It’s often the only one that makes sense.
Authored by: Kathy Grunditz, Director, Brand Strategy at OneNorth