The Los Angeles-based business’ in-house team has built a series of Modeled Communities that it said will give clients a “faster, more flexible way to explore ideas and hypotheses”.

Each community is designed to be used ahead of traditional research projects to explore “which concepts are worth advancing, which need more work and which new hypotheses are worth chasing once results are in”.

The communities have been built using extensive interviews with real-life consumers, who have been asked about their backgrounds, motivations and decision-making processes. Breakthrough Research said its R&D showed the resulting synthetic respondents gave answers that were consistent with real humans.

Dan Braker, president of Breakthrough Research, said: “Our approach has always been building custom research solutions for our clients’ toughest business questions.

“Modeled Communities apply that same rigour to a faster format. This is a complement to strong, people-informed research — not a replacement for it.”

Uses of the communities include pre-testing ideas before a full study, vetting and iterating on hypotheses, reaching harder-to-recruit audiences, testing confidential concepts and honing a questionnaire before fielding.