Research and creation

Starting a persona

1. Define the exact brand, market, language and intended conversations. A corporate group, hotel brand, product and loyalty scheme are different scopes.
2. Gather public sources. Record publisher, URL, retrieval date, relevant passage, scope, uncertainties and contradictions. First-party positioning is evidence of what a brand says, not proof of its performance.
3. Extract bounded facts. Never turn a local policy into a worldwide promise. Never assume an expired claim is current. Failed extraction stays a gap.
4. Make editorial DNA decisions. Record why each trait was chosen, evidence used and the assumptions. Numbers are design hypotheses, not measurements of a brand's soul.
5. Build curated encounters, including unknowns and uncomfortable questions. Use the shared page, orb and voice transport.
6. Run the Gauntlet and review results before promotion. Local illustrative prototypes are not authorised brand deployments.

Depth before scale

A source count is not a completeness claim. Define the intended coverage and record what is missing. An athlete dossier, selected event, full career and play-by-play ledger are different things. Historical sponsorship evidence does not prove a current relationship. Advertising interpretation does not establish match results or private thoughts.

Pre currently has ten starter athlete dossiers, ten selected events and five campaign records. His corpus is bounded; full histories and live data remain future work. Sporting research, campaign provenance and voice review, and coaching evidence document the scope.

Brand-owned athlete evidence

A brand’s internal knowledge could make its persona more useful than public product pages alone. For Nike, a proposed source is documented shoe use by college, elite and everyday athletes: product testing, training records, event photographs and verified results. Whether Nike maintains a complete, accessible list is a discovery question, not an established fact.

The intended answer is simple: “Athlete X wore this model at event Y and ran Z.” To publish it, the record must identify the exact model and version, distinguish a prototype from a retail shoe, record the colourway where known, and link both the wearing evidence and the event result. Training, testing, exhibitions and races are separate contexts. A signature edition or sponsorship does not establish that the athlete wore that model at an event.

Nike would supply an approved feed, export or scoped interface from its own systems. Records retain athlete identity, model/SKU, date, event, distance, result, photograph or source, verification status, publication rights, permitted audience, review owner and last check. Public appearances and confidential tester information are separate. Everyday and college athletes’ private records require appropriate consent and permissions. Access is limited to the intended client and audience; this data does not flow into other brands’ personas.

Pre retrieves relevant approved records during a conversation, with sources available when useful. This is a knowledge connection, not an assumption that we retrain the underlying model. CEM controls approved collections and visibility; the Gauntlet tests wrong shoe generations, invented times, contradictory records, confidential disclosures and revoked permissions. A named brand reviewer approves release. Useful factual evidence can enrich the conversation without becoming a promise of a customer’s performance.

Current status: proposed; no Nike internal athlete records, feed, photo-matching service or event/result/model matches are connected. The shoe encounter marks this as a future capability.