Frontiers: Determining the Validity of Large Language Models for Automated Perceptual Analysis

This paper explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) to substitute for human participants in market research. Such LLMs can be used to generate text given a prompt. We argue that perceptual analysis is a particularly promising use case for such automated market research for certain product categories. The proposed new method generates outputs that closely match those generated from human surveys: agreement rates between human- and LLM- generated data sets reach over 75%. Moreover, this applies for perceptual analysis based on both brand similarity measures and product attribute ratings. The paper demonstrates that, for some categories, this new method of fully or partially automated market research will increase the efficiency of market research by meaningfully speeding up the process and potentially reducing the cost. Further results also suggest that with an ever larger training corpus applied to large language models, LLM-based market research will be applicable to answer more nuanced questions based on demographic variables or contextual variation that would be prohibitively expensive or infeasible with human respondents.