Persona or not to Persona

Have you ever heard about personas or buyer personas? It’s pretty trendy and has become a significant part of segmenting your audience towards your more profitable wants and needs.

While personas can have a positive impact when it comes to creating the right target group, it is easy to end up misusing them, leading to a worse result than expected. Persona creation has a lot of pitfalls, and it might not be the right solution for businesses.

What are personas?

Personas are, simply put, a fictional recreation of a segment that might need your service or product. Personas have the last years become a significant part of marketing and UX to figure out how to create a product or campaign that is optimized for the buyers you’d want. A Persona should tell us what they feel, trying to accomplish, or what is getting in their way so that we can create great Customer Experiences.

The tricky thing about personas is that there are many ways and best practices, but none of them are explicitly tailored to your business. How many personas should I create? Do I have too little data? Am I misinterpreting the data? What should I focus on?

An illustration of different personas from Accenture Global Financial Services Consumer Study

How to create a persona

This part is mostly risk-mitigation. Every business is different, and every company has additional requirements for their customers, but there are some things we know pretty confident.

1. Gather data

The first thing you’ve got to do is to gather data. Get to know as much as you possibly can about your users and potential users. Don’t have any specific user data? Get some! There is plenty of facts about potential customers just a Google-click away, but make sure your sources are up-to-date. Old sources can be a dangerous path to misinformed decisions. If you have the possibility and resources - don’t forget qualitative research.

2. Identify commonalities

So you have this bunch of data that shows you a lot of information. It’s ironic to say this, but to make personas; you’ll have to generalize. Form hypotheses based on the data you gathered, and find commonalities in behavior and psychographics. You will see patterns that distinguish one audience from another and be able to create different user groups based on the data you’ve got.

3. Identify Pains, Gains, and Jobs

Pains, gains, and jobs are based on Strategizer’s value-proposition Canvas, but I find it highly useful when creating personas as well. When you have identified the behaviors and psychographics, you are ready to analyze what the groups’ pains, gains, and jobs are. Figure out what the customers want to achieve, and the concrete benefits they are seeking. Find the obstacles that the group is facing, and figure out what the customer wants to get done. Relate this to your product, and you should have plenty of information to make an informed decision.

4. Create personas

You then create your personas. Not sure how many you’re going to develop? Some say 3-8 is the best, but the correct answer will always be: It depends. For some organizations, there are few big, distinct groups of psychographics and common behaviors, which makes it logical to have few personas. In contrast, other organizations might have very different psychographics and behaviors. In these cases, it makes sense to have a lot more personas. If you’re afraid it will get too messy, you can create ‘main’ and ‘sub’ personas.

It is important to note that personas are just a guideline to know how best to handle a customer and to have a headstart on how you best can serve their needs. That means that it’s a short, concise snipped much more than a detailed novel of information about this fictional character. If you want a useful tool for the creation, try Hubspot’s, but there’s more than enough other devices if you, by chance, dislike Hubspot. And a tip: Don’t give the persona a face; it makes you biased towards the persona.

5. Identify how you can help

Wherever you are in your organization, whether it is design, marketing, or sales, personas should be at the center of attention for the work you do. My view of the function of an organization is to help those they serve. I believe that if you focus on your customers' needs and the experience of the service or product, you won't have to focus on using 'tricks' to persuade your customers. People talk about 'creating' social proof through specific effort, but if you have outstanding customer experience, that social proof will happen by itself.

Knowing your persona will make it easier to create a superior Customer Experience that people will share with kind words. See how you can help your customers so they can experience the best from your company, whether it is the product, marketing, or sales team. They are all a part of creating that same total experience.

The Problems and Challenges With Personas

Personas are nice and all, but there are a lot of pitfalls and challenges that make personas ineffective, or it can even be the wrong solution altogether for your business.

1. It's nothing more than an artificial average

Fred has $150 000 in Income and lives in the city; Eric has $50 000 in Income and lives in the countryside. Your persona will be someone with $100 000 and live in the suburbs. Not very accurate, right? The example is, of course, extreme, and to make a point. Don't mistake a persona for a real person. It is an artificial average of data you have collected. If you were a business that only got data from Fred and Eric, chances are your persona would be pretty terrible if you put them in one persona. In the end, data collection is a way to mitigate the assumptions you make.

2. You only focus on the demographics or unimportant details

"Eric is 50 years old exec with $150 000 in income, and all he wants now is to get the newest Mercedes to show off to his friends". You find that the average age of the people who buy from you are 50 years old, and then create your persona based on the things that 'normal' 50-year olds do. But what if the rest of your audience is 34-65 and there are no apparent age distributions? The age of a persona means very little, and will most likely be best to exclude, unless you know it is an influential group or a significant majority.

On the other hand, you have those who provide you with too much detail. If you're selling cars, and you say that one of your personas drink Coca-Cola, you've lost. You're already making judgments based on your impression of Coca-Cola-drinkers. Does it matter if you're persona drinks Coke or Pepsi? Or if he goes to Starbucks or Dunkin? No. What means something is his pains, gains, and jobs. Focus on that!

3. You create based on your opinion

People are subjective and biased. If you have an opinion and have been intensely working to implement that, but you get data that contradicts what you've said, it is effortless to deliberately perform an analysis in a way that benefits your opinion. We've probably all done it. Maybe even just ignored gathering data altogether to ensure we're not wrong and instead live in ignorance. But when creating a persona, we have to be subjective and look at the numbers. If you develop personas on the wrong premises, your entire customer experience will suffer.

Is this the best way?

I don't know. I do know, however, that Microsoft has created an alternative for those who don't want or can't spend the time and effort to get the personas right. Persona Spectrum has a lot of benefits as well, and if you think this will work better for you or have already tried it, please give me an update on how you experienced it!

“A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It shows how that motivation can change depending on context.”