It was a familiar scene in the modern marketing department: the clock ticking past midnight as creative teams huddled around endless dashboards and campaign drafts, recycling ideas and testing variations in the hope that something would finally catch fire with their target audience. The cycle was marked by costly rounds of trial and error, with little insight into why specific campaigns connected and others simply disappeared without a trace.
For many marketers, the gap between what they assumed about their audience and what their audience truly felt remained painfully wide. This disconnect led to missed opportunities and eroding budgets, making marketing feel more like a guessing game than ever before.
It is precisely this dilemma that Elaris, the new empathetic intelligence tool from Solsten, aims to resolve, building an era where marketers move past speculation and harness actionable empathy to resonate deeply with their audiences.
Empathic Intelligence Powers Elaris
Elaris distinguishes itself from conventional marketing solutions by building its framework on real psychological data rather than scraped web content and demographic templates. Years of research and strategic partnerships with leading digital products and gaming studios provided Elaris with access to anonymized, first-party psychological profiles of 3.4 billion individuals. This comprehensive dataset was collected through years of scientific research and partnerships with leading digital platforms, measuring over 250 psychological traits to identify the underlying motivations, values, and emotional drivers that influence consumer behavior.
With this extensive database, Elaris enables marketers to construct dynamic, conversational audience personas grounded in clinically validated assessments of motivation, values, and emotional drivers.
Unlike tools that make educated guesses or force-fit personas from static survey data, Elaris enables marketers to engage with evolving models that capture the nuances of real audience psychology. Instead of surface-level targeting based on interests or browsing history, professionals gain access to the authentic needs and inner narratives shaping purchase decisions.
“It’s not enough for AI to generate text. It has to understand why people care,” Joe Schaeppi, chief executive officer and co-founder of Solsten, explains. “Marketing works when it’s simple, human, and tailored to what makes your audience feel something. Elaris gives you that.”
Why Emotion Matters in Marketing
The rise of the experience economy has heightened consumer expectations, shifting attention from products to the emotions and feelings they evoke. According to the University of Southern California, the 2023 advertising campaign performance shows that 31% of ads with an emotional pull succeeded, compared to the 16% success rate of ads that focused on rational content.
Elaris’s empathic intelligence builds on this data, helping marketers bridge the gap between brand aspirations and audience reality. It uncovers emotional tensions, customer motivations, and the psychological barriers that shape decisions, providing actionable recommendations even in saturated markets.
It transforms marketing from a guessing game into data-driven empathic intelligence, where a marketer’s competitive advantage derives not from the size of the budget, but from the depth of audience understanding.
“It won’t be the loudest brands or the biggest budgets that win tomorrow,” Schaeppi affirms. “The future belongs to those who understand people best. That’s the promise of empathic intelligence—and it’s what Elaris delivers today.”
Simplifying Campaign Decisions
Elaris eliminates more than just the campaign guesswork. Its empathic intelligence also transforms daily marketing operations. Because Elaris’s audience models constantly evolve as new data becomes available, brands stay ahead of shifting consumer sentiment and market dynamics.
Bastian Bergmann, co-founder of Solsten and author of Press Play, believes that this agility compresses the traditional marketing development cycle from weeks to minutes. Marketers are no longer stuck in the costly loop of hope and rework, where the majority of content created never gets used.
Instead, they receive faster recommendations tailored to the psychological makeup of their actual markets, enabling them to make timely pivots and achieve strategic clarity.
Imagine what happens when a brand launches a new product. The brand’s marketing team can benefit from Elaris’ conversational interface, which allows them to test messaging, creative concepts, and product features in a live environment, rapidly identifying what will resonate or fall flat—all before going live. Through this, last-minute changes can be made easily, increasing the chances of desirable results.
Elaris: The AI Tool that Feels
Schaeppi recognizes that most users today identify AI with impersonal, automated outputs, solutions that lack genuine authenticity and often fail to capture a brand’s unique voice. This disconnect can risk audience trust and leave campaigns feeling generic or disconnected. What differentiates Elaris is its design philosophy: it is built not just to process data, but to understand and reflect the emotional nuances of real people, empowering marketers to make more meaningful connections.
With Elaris, the nature of marketing evolves. Marketers and audiences are united within a collaborative environment that encourages deeper understanding on both sides. Elaris enables the creation of marketing strategies that move beyond transactional messaging, transforming campaigns from simple calls to “buy this product” into experiences that inspire intentional, emotion-driven purchasing and lasting brand relationships.
Please visit Elaris’ website to join the waitlist of 14,000 people or skip the line and gain first access through ElarisPro.
