How to Supercharge Brand Planning using Virtual Audiences

The end of the year is the natural time to pause, take stock, and decide what comes next. For most marketing and brand teams, that means reviewing how your brand performed, what missed the mark, the impact of competitors, and where to focus in the year ahead.

But brand planning is complex and uses a wide array of data - both internal and external.  Often the consumer voice is minimized in the search for gross margin improvement, or product reformulation.   Keeping your target consumer at the heart of brand planning is crucial to ensuring your strategies and campaigns are relevant, targeted and effective.

Virtual Audiences, one of Yabble’s AI-powered insights tools, puts the consumer at the forefront of every decision.

When you set a research topic or question, Virtual Audiences automatically builds a knowledge lake combining the most up to date public data and, if you choose, proprietary data. From there, it generates market insights, trend summaries, and AI personas that represent real audience segments linked to your topic. You can chat directly with these personas to explore opinions, motivations, and reactions — even share images to see how audiences might respond to visual content.

This gives you a clear, evidence-based view of your brand performance and audience perception — without the time and cost associated with traditional research. You can move from question to action in hours, not weeks.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to using Virtual Audiences to make your brand planning faster, sharper, and more insightful.

1: Gather Your Brand & Campaign Content

Start by collecting everything that represents how your brand showed up in 2025. Pull together your campaigns, social posts, product launches, packaging, events, PR activity, and any brand moments that shaped public perception. This isn’t just about the polished highlights — include everyday touchpoints too, like email content or influencer collaborations.

Once you have everything, organize it by theme or objective: awareness, loyalty, community, product growth, etc. Seeing the full spread of your brand activity helps you understand not only what you did, but how consistently you showed up across channels.

How Virtual Audiences helps:
Use Virtual Audiences to add clarity and context as you sort through your material. Set your topic around this year's campaigns or initiatives, then explore how your AI personas describe the brand activity. Their reactions will help you categorize content by tone, emotional impact, and perceived brand alignment — making it easier to identify what felt cohesive and what stood out as inconsistent.

Example:
A skincare brand gathering its 2025 campaigns might find hundreds of assets such as influencer images, new product packaging, or sustainability-focused PR content. Using Virtual Audiences, they can upload examples from each and instantly see how audiences perceive them. The AI personas might describe the influencer content as “relatable and authentic,” while the PR campaign comes across as “corporate and distant.” That early feedback helps the team organize their materials with purpose, setting up a clearer discussion about consistency and tone in the next step.

2: Understand The Competition

Once you’ve gathered your own content, it’s time to look outward. Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum and understanding how you stack up against competitors is key to seeing your year in perspective. Review what other players in your category have done — product launches, tone-of-voice changes and anything else noteworthy. Ask yourself: who gained ground in 2025, who lost relevance, and how has the competitive landscape evolved around you?

How Virtual Audiences helps:
Virtual Audiences make it simple to analyze your competitors with the same depth you apply to your own brand. By setting your research topic around your category, you can explore how different audiences perceive competing brands — their strengths, weaknesses, and emotional positioning. You might ask, “How do consumers describe the leading brands in this space?” or “Which brand feels most innovative, trustworthy, or premium?”. Virtual Audiences will surface clear, comparative insights that reveal where you stand and what opportunities exist to differentiate.

Example:
A beverage brand running a “healthy lifestyle” campaign in 2025 could use Virtual Audiences to benchmark itself against competitors that also launched health-focused products. When exploring the topic, AI personas might describe one competitor as “authentically health-driven,” another as “too performance-focused,” and your brand as “fresh but not yet established in the wellness space.” That feedback helps the team see both positioning gaps and growth opportunities — for instance, leaning more into credibility and community in next year’s campaigns.

3: Get Wider Context

After reviewing your own brand activity and the competitive landscape, the next step is to understand the broader environment that will influence your brand in the year ahead. Look at macroeconomic conditions, societal trends, policy or regulatory changes, and emerging consumer behaviors. This context helps you interpret your findings realistically and identify potential opportunities or risks before you begin planning specific campaigns or initiatives.

How Virtual Audiences helps:
Virtual Audiences can bring this wider context to life by showing how audiences perceive and respond to external forces. You can explore questions like: How do consumers react to economic pressures or inflation in your category? How do sustainability trends or regulatory shifts shape perception of your products or messaging? How do these factors influence how your competitors are seen in the market? Chatting with AI personas linked to your topic allows you to uncover nuanced insights about audience priorities, concerns, and expectations in the current environment.

Example:
A consumer packaged goods brand assessing its category might discover that inflation has shifted spending priorities, younger audiences are increasingly valuing sustainability, and new regulations around product labeling are coming into effect. By exploring these trends with Virtual Audiences, the brand can see how different segments interpret these changes: Gen Z personas might view sustainable packaging as a must-have, while older audiences may focus more on value and affordability. Comparing these insights with competitor behavior gives the team a clearer picture of the forces shaping their market in 2026.

4: Monitor Results & Stay Reactive

Even with the best planning, markets shift quickly. New competitors appear, consumer priorities change, and trends move fast. The final step in your year-end review is to stay connected to your audience as you move forward — using insights not as a one-off report, but as a living resource for decision-making.

How Virtual Audiences helps:
Virtual Audiences can continue to provide feedback throughout the year. You can revisit your personas regularly to test new content, check how audiences perceive brand updates, or gauge reactions to emerging trends. This creates an ongoing feedback loop that keeps you close to your market without needing to launch a new research project every time.

Example:
A CPG brand planning a product line extension in early 2026 might use Virtual Audiences to test packaging, slogans, and visuals before going live. When a competitor launches a similar product mid-year, the team can return to the same personas to explore how the market might react and adjust their messaging in real time.

Conclusion

An end-of-year brand review shouldn’t be a box-ticking exercise or a long post-mortem. It’s a chance to understand how your brand is perceived, align your team around what really matters, and move into next year with clarity and confidence.

With Virtual Audiences, you can make that process faster, smarter, and grounded in real audience perspective — without waiting weeks for data or relying on internal assumptions. You’ll see what worked, what didn’t, and how to turn insight into meaningful action — all inside Yabble’s secure environment.