Facts instead of self-presentation. How to describe a brand before researching LLM responses? | 3

Part III | Personas, competitors and model control

A brand does not take part in every decision as one indivisible whole. Someone building a house looks for a different offer from a logistics centre manager, and both differ from a user who needs a repair. If we connect every persona with every product and treat every company in the sector as a competitor of the whole brand, we get a model that is only apparently complete. This part explains how to use Semantio to represent the real relationships between the offer, people and market alternatives.

After structuring the offer in part two of this series, we can move on to relationships: who makes the decision, which products their situation concerns and which alternatives are genuinely relevant.

A persona is a decision situation, not a stock photograph

The persona form includes the Persona Profile Name and Context, Goals & Priorities fields. Their names clearly indicate what we need. A persona cannot be a general segment or a demographic stereotype. A description such as “woman aged 30–45 who values quality and modernity” does not tell us which decision this person needs to make, what they are looking for or which part of the offer matters to them.

A useful persona describes:

• professional role or life situation

• responsibility within the decision

• problem or goal

• evaluation criteria

• constraints

• stage of the process

• products or services to which the decision relates

In B2B, the persona name may identify a specific role, for example:

• architect designing a facility

• facility manager responsible for equipment reliability

• technical buyer selecting a supplier

• logistics centre project manager

• plant transformation manager

• start-up founder looking for a pilot project

In B2C, the situation may matter more than demographics:

• individual investor building or renovating a house

• user of an existing gate who needs a repair

• person looking for a one-to-one session with a facilitator

• participant interested in a particular workshop format

• person working independently with digital materials

What a good persona description looks like

Too broad

Homeowner who values quality, safety and modern design.

We do not know whether this person is building a house, dealing with a fault, replacing a door, buying an operator or comparing access-control systems.

Specific

A person deciding whether to purchase a garage door, entrance door or automation system while building or renovating a home. They are looking for a solution suited to the dimensions, building structure and intended use. They compare the total project cost, installation method, insulation, safety, delivery timeframe, warranty and availability of future servicing. They need clear information about what is included in measurement, quotation, delivery, installation and commissioning.

This description does not attempt to guess personality. It shows a real problem, the criteria and the scope of the decision.

B2B example

A person responsible for the reliability of gates, operators, technical doors and loading-bay equipment in an operating facility. Their goal may be to resolve a fault, carry out an inspection, modernise equipment or find an ongoing service provider. Priorities include safety, reduced downtime, response time, parts availability and documentation of completed work.

Here, too, we do not need age or a lifestyle description. Role and responsibility are enough to build relevant scenarios.

Connect each persona only with the right products

Once you have completed the offer, Semantio allows you to assign products relevant to the persona’s decision situation. This is not merely cosmetic form organisation. It is one of the most important relationships in the entire Identity.

The model is:

persona → problem and criteria → products or services relevant to that decision

One persona can be connected with several products. One product can concern many personas. This does not mean, however, that every person should be connected with everything.

The example of a house and garden follows the same principle. If the offer includes roof windows, PVC windows, patio doors, pergolas and conservatories, the persona “person with a house and garden who is planning a new garden layout” may be connected with pergolas and conservatories. There is no reason to automatically assign roof windows simply because they belong to the same brand.

The product-to-persona relationship protects the research from creating scenarios that are formally related to the brand but inconsistent with real human behaviour.

Do not create personas in advance

Let us establish one thing: the number of personas is not a measure of the quality of the Identity you have prepared.

A new persona is needed when it represents a materially different way of making a decision. Two people may be concerned with the same product but have different roles and criteria. An architect needs design data and installation dimensions. A technical buyer compares the scope of delivery, cost, schedule and service terms. A facility manager assesses later operation, response time and downtime risk.

Differences in age, job title or sector do not justify separate personas if the problem, criteria and part of the offer remain the same.

Before adding another profile, ask:

Does this persona lead to a different set of justified questions, or does it only give a different name to the same audience?

A competitor is an alternative in a specific decision

The Competitors section lets you add a competitor’s name, website, description, business type and e-commerce information.

The most important question is not “who operates in this sector?”. It is:

Who might this persona genuinely consider instead of the researched brand in this specific decision?

A company may be a competitor only for part of the portfolio.

In the example of a gates and doors supplier, three different types of alternatives can be identified:

1. local company offering garage doors, entrance doors, automation and installation for individual customers

2. nationwide specialist in industrial doors and loading-bay systems

3. authorised service provider competing primarily for repairs, maintenance and modernisation of existing equipment

The first company may be a genuine alternative for someone building a home. The second may be an alternative for a logistics centre manager. The third may be relevant to a facility manager or a user who needs a repair. None of them needs to compete with the whole brand offer.

The same applies to an education brand. A coaching school may be an alternative for someone considering a professional path, but not for a participant in a particular ceremony or a user of digital materials. A self-guided method may compete for the attention of people looking for tools for personal use, but it does not necessarily constitute an alternative to a course with a particular status.

How to describe a competitor neutrally

The description field should not be used to create an advantage for the researched brand.

Not good

Large, inflexible competitor offering more expensive and less personalised solutions.

This is positioning, not a research description.

Better

A company operating in the Polish market that designs, supplies and services industrial doors and loading-bay systems for manufacturing plants, warehouses and logistics centres. It is an alternative in industrial projects, but not in the area of external doors for homes.

This description identifies the category, market, audiences and boundary of competition. It does not tell the model which company is better.

Even if a prompt in the form refers to positioning and differentiators, record observable differences first and foremost. Information that a company operates only in B2B, serves all of Poland or offers a particular category may be material. A judgement that it is less flexible, lower in quality or more innovative should not enter the neutral foundations of the research without strong and appropriately documented evidence.

Do not automatically add:

• marketplaces

• trade media and industry portals

• industry organisations

• commercial partners

• manufacturers supplying components to the researched brand

• companies that merely appear alongside the brand in search results

• entities with similar names that solve a different problem

A competitor should have a justification, not merely a resemblance.

Check the model from both sides

Once you have added products, personas and competitors, run a consistency test.

From the product side

• has every important product been connected with at least one real persona

• was an item without a persona added because it is material, or only because it appears on the website

• is a product actually a service or a variant of another item

From the persona side

• does every persona have a specific problem and relevant products

• does the description lead to scenarios different from those of other personas

• has the whole portfolio been assigned merely for convenience

• do the criteria follow from the role or genuine knowledge of customers

From the competitor side

• is it clear in which category they compete

• does the competition concern the researched market

• can you identify a persona or situation in which they are a genuine alternative

• does the description avoid positioning the researched brand

This is a simple but effective test. If we cannot explain why an element is in the Identity and what it is connected with, it probably needs to be corrected or removed.

Choosing AI providers completes the configuration

At the end of the Identity configuration, Semantio lets you select the systems included in monitoring. At the time of writing, August 2026, you can choose Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek. Each provider shows a credit cost, while the panel displays the estimated cost of running the research.

This is an operational stage, not another component of the brand description. The choice of systems nevertheless affects the conditions of observation. Responses can differ between models, interfaces, markets and measurement moments. A sound AI visibility audit therefore records the system, date, language, market, scenario and complete response.

It is also not useful to reduce the result to a single number. Presence, recommendation, factual accuracy, citations and stability describe different phenomena, as explained in AI visibility is not one metric.

Checklist for a complete Identity

Before clicking Create Identity, check the whole model. You can always edit Identity data later.

Scope and brand

• the researched entity is unambiguous

• market, country, language and business model are correct

• aliases do not contain other entities

• the brand description is neutral and fact-based

• the brand has not been positioned against competitors

Offer

• all material product and service groups have been included

• products have not been fragmented excessively

• services have not been hidden inside product descriptions

• there are no duplicates or historical items presented as current

• descriptions identify function, use case and important limitations

Personas and relationships

• each persona represents a specific decision situation

• each has a goal, criteria and constraints

• only relevant products have been assigned to personas

• no persona has been connected with the whole portfolio without justification

• important products have corresponding decision contexts

Competitors

• each competitor is a genuine alternative

• the scope of competition has been described

• market and business model are correct

• partners, portals and coincidentally similar companies have not been added as competitors

• descriptions contain neither value judgements nor sales arguments

Sources and gaps

• material facts are supported by sources or the knowledge of an identified person

• brand claims have been separated from facts

• uncertain information has been marked for clarification

• no gap has been filled with text merely because an empty field felt uncomfortable

A good Identity does not describe everything

An Identity is complete not when it contains everything that can be said about a brand, but when it contains everything needed to conduct a specified study reliably.

This is an important difference.

An excessively detailed profile can be as problematic as one that is too general. It introduces peripheral products, incidental personas and competitors unrelated to the most important decisions. It increases the number of possible scenarios, but does not necessarily increase the value of the research.

A good Identity is selective. It keeps the facts, boundaries and relationships that matter. It leaves out marketing filler. It lets you see a brand as a system of relationships between the offer, people and alternatives.

Build a model that can genuinely be tested

If you already have a neutral brand description, move on to the offer and add only those products and services that represent distinct decision situations. Then describe people through their real decisions and assign the appropriate parts of the portfolio to them. Finally, add competitors that a customer might genuinely consider in the same contexts.

Then Semantio will not research an abstract statement of brand identity. It will monitor the brand’s representation in situations that resemble real human questions.

Start in the app, create your first Identity and conduct a final review with someone who knows the offer and customers’ decision processes. If the results reveal ambiguities, incorrect associations or missing relationships, treat them as material for further work on the brand’s semantics, not as an invitation to improve the result through shortcuts.

The aim is not to teach the research a preferred answer. The aim is to create conditions in which model responses can be viewed, compared and verified honestly.