10 Rules that are foundational to the creation of buyer personas. Describes the key prinicples of buyer persona development and how they differ from customer profiling. A soource to help companies in the understanding of how buyer personas help to inform customer strategy.
1. Rules
For
Buyer
Persona
By Tony Zambito, President & CEO , Goal Centric
Development
www.goalcentric.com
www.buyerpersonainsights.com
Copyright 2010 Goal Centric Management, Inc.
2. Buyer Personas are archetypal representations of customers and buyers that
model buyer goals and are derived from qualitative and experiential analysis.
They have started to work their way into the mainstream conscious of the
marketing realm at an accelerate rate. I have been involved in the persona
and buyer persona development movement for over a decade and have
witnessed their evolution firsthand. Starting in 2002, our firm Goal Centric
carved out a path to transition user persona methodology that informs
design strategy to the formulation of buyer persona development
methodology that informs customer strategy.
Over the years, I have seen many misconceptions about buyer personas in
general as well as misunderstanding in how to implement a buyer persona
development initiative that informs customer strategy. The following 10 rules
are a collection of Buyer Persona Insights blog postings that is intended to
provide a foundational understanding of buyer persona development that I
hope will help organizations today to realize the full value of buyer persona
Introduction development.
4. The rise in popularity of buyer personas has also meant a rise in people
getting them wrong. The building awareness of the term and the idea of
using buyer personas in marketing on a mass level can be traced to David
Meerman’s Scott book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR. My partner
Angela Quail and I worked with courageous companies who were early
adopters of buyer personas after Goal Centric launched the buyer persona
methodology in 2002. I still can recall the look on executive’s faces when we
started talking to them about buyer personas back then – as in – “what are
you talking about!?” I guess we should have written a book! We give much
kudos to David for writing the chapter he did in his book and he is a great
ambassador for putting buyer personas into practice.
Here is what is bugging me though of late. While I am extremely excited
about the building awareness, I am also seeing with much concern people
writing and talking about buyer personas and clearly getting it wrong. I like to
add that some going so far to even misquote David from his very own
book. Here’s a recommendation I bet David would concur with me on – read
the book!
It bothers me for a couple of very good reasons: it devalues buyer personas
and it puts up a roadblock for buyer personas to inform strategy. Believe me;
if executives of major corporations see buyer personas as a “tool” to profile
buyers and not a best practice, then the buyer persona development
process will not have much hope of expanding beyond that.
5. The word archetype is used to describe what a buyer persona is, even
David used the word in his book however the question missed by most is
this: what makes up an archetype?
In my experience over the last ten years, I believe there are 10 rules for
creating a buyer persona, an archetype and model of a buyer you wish to
deeply understand. Rules garnered from on the ground learning, experience,
sweat, tears, many late nights getting it right for a client, meetings with
senior executives, deploying their use to hundreds of people in sales and
marketing, seeing them in action, and going back to the roots of persona
development more than a decade ago. Here is the first:
Rule 1: You can't just make up a buyer persona.
I see this all the time – the idea that all you have to do is look over your
customer data, interview a couple of sales reps, and start creating a buyer
persona. It doesn’t work that way. You end up creating a bad buyer persona
that offers no real insight. They may look nice but they quickly become the
shiny new object. A static snapshot that loses its' luster after used a few
times. After many interviews with front line people, I've learned that
they put little stock in them when buyer personas are created in this way; and
may never admit to doing so out of good old fear in corporate culture. You
see, many marketing and sales reps will respond with "I could have come up
with that; what's the big hoopla all about?" They are right.
7. If you’ve visited Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, you’ve undoubtedly
encountered the many street vendors. One of the most visible is those who
promise to draw your caricature profile on the spot. My answer to them
these days when they “bark” at me to sit down and have my profile drawn is
– “if you can make me look 10 years younger, I’ll do it!”
This next rule has to do with profiling. Customer profiles have been around
for a very long time. They crept their way into sales methodologies, CRM,
marketing, market research, and etc. They have served their purpose in
looking at demographics, psychographics, customer purchasing data,
geographic concentrations, and other characteristics. All these data points
contribute to drawing up a customer profile that describes the characteristics
of targeted customers. Hence the next rule:
Rule 2: Don’t Confuse a Buyer Persona with a Customer Profile
This is a very common misunderstanding about a buyer persona. I’ve seen
many attempted descriptions of a buyer persona that describe them as a
profile. A buyer persona can include characteristics common to customer
profiles however they are intended to go far beyond that to reveal deep
insight into your buyers and customers.
8. An analogy that works well is that when an actor takes on a role, that role is
described to him or her. The role has a profile of how old the character is,
what it might look like, where it fits into the story, and other
descriptors. The actor’s and the director’s job is to dig deep to reveal the
motivations, the behavior, the mind, and hero-like or villain-like qualities of
the role. Some actors reveal insights into a role that were nearly impossible
to have figured out before rehearsals began
The downside is that this confusion creates a perception among senior
executives about buyer personas that is off the mark. Most have experience
with customer profiles, which became prominent starting in the ‘80’s. It is
problematic in the sense that the value of buyer personas is not seen and the
mindset is to dismiss buyer personas as a mere profiling exercise.
Anyone who has ever sought executive sponsorship knows what I am talking
about. If the mindset is settled about what a concept is perceived to be, then
the hurdle is that much harder to jump to gain executive buy-in.
9. Get the Right People with the
Right Attributes and Skills
10. Did you ever have one of those sleepless nights in a Godforsaken hotel and
you find yourself channel flipping? You 100k miles per year executives know
exactly what I am talking about. You suddenly hit an infomercial promising
you earnings twice to three times what you are making now and you only
have to work as little as 10 hours per week. Infomercials are good at this.
They are real good at showing you the golf course, the BMW, and the
testimonials of people who live the lifestyle of the rich and famous. As you
sit there in your catatonic state your mind screams “- why can’t I have that!”
This next rule has to do with not falling for the promise that you can have just
anybody on your team creating high quality buyer personas after they attend
a one-hour workshop:
Rule 3: Get the right people with the right attributes and right skill sets
Like any new concept that begins to rise in awareness, you start to see
workshops promising that in an hour or half-day you will be creating buyer
personas and you will be taking them back with you to the office. As
mentioned before in this series, this approach seriously devalues buyer
personas in the eyes of executives. It takes a certain set of attributes and skill
sets to do the qualitative work, distill what you’ve learned, create buyer
personas that are reflective of true buyer goals, and are
meaningful. Needless to say, to begin to apply attributes and skill sets to
actual experience takes more than an hour or a half-day.
.
11. I’ve seen several buyer persona development initiatives fail because they
were simply put in the wrong hands. It was just a matter of the wrong set of
attributes and skill sets compounded by the lack of adequate
knowledge. And as many of you know; this is a recipe for disaster and a failed
project.
One of the key issues is that there are aspiring marketers who want to learn
how to create a buyer persona but the reality is that all may not possess the
right attributes and skills to do so or to carry out an in-depth buyer persona
development initiative that can last 3 to 4 months. This poses a real dilemma
for senior executives to choose the right people to be involved in buyer
persona development efforts with the intent to inform strategy and one they
must get right.
The next time a request to approve sending personnel to a one-hour
workshop to become an expert in creating a buyer persona, snap out of the
catatonic state traveling has you in and come to your senses – it is impossible
for one to learn the expertise required in one hour.
13. Understanding your customer’s pain points has been a staple of sales and
marketing for quite some time. Gaining a solid grasps on their motivations,
drivers, personalities, people they interact with, and the likes has led to many
programs offering clues on how to reach, sell, and close business with
buyers. Anyone who has been through a significant amount of sales training
can attest to how each program stresses the need for understanding buyer’s
needs and wants as well as the promise of adapting your selling style to that
of an analytical or other personality types. The difficulty lies in putting the
picture together and making sense of what you have learned. The next rule is
one of the cornerstone rules first established by Alan Cooper; many consider
being the founding father of personas:
Rule 4: Buyer Personas are a Translation of Goals
This may sound relatively simple and easy but it is not when you consider
that goals, in this framework, are a result of translating all of the findings
gathered in qualitative research such as pain points, motivations, drivers,
interactions, and personalities. Alan Cooper created user personas for the
purpose of informing Goal Directed Design Strategy. My colleague, Angela
Quail, and I took this same principle we learned from Cooper to help clients
create a Goal Centric Customer Strategy that are informed by buyer
personas.
14. Getting at the goals of buyers can be tough for this reason: buyers may not
always be able to articulate their own goals clearly or are yet precise about
goals of the organization. Thus it takes some solid qualitative research to
arrive at discovering buyer goals that are truly a translation of insight that
senior executives can rely on to make sound decisions on customer, sales,
and marketing strategies.
I believe that this is one of the most important rules in buyer persona
development. Keeping the focus on goals will help you and your organization
to have meaningful buyer personas that lead to winning strategies.
16. When you travel to a foreign country where you are not familiar with the
culture or the language, it can be exciting yet very trying. The first few hours
are like being in a giant maze and you wonder how you will ever get to find
your way around and be able to communicate with the locals. The next few
days are a real struggle as you attempt to make sense of all the gestures,
facial expressions, and how the local people respond to you as you seek help.
If you are there more than a week, you find yourself surprisingly starting to
immerse yourself into the culture and you are doing so almost entirely on a
non-verbal level. All the funny gestures, expressive motions of the hands,
wrinkle of the faces, and the exasperated laughter of those trying to help you
suddenly are beginning to make sense. At the very least you now know how
to order an espresso nonverbally.
This next rule deals with a critical element of buyer persona development
that serves executives as they formulate customer strategy:
Rule 5: A Buyer Persona Offers Insight into the Unarticulated and Not-So
Obvious
As in visiting a foreign country, visiting buyers can be akin to going on foreign
territory. It is tough to make out specifically what they mean. And what
buyers say may not always be what they mean.
17. While information respective to a customer profile about background, job
functions with related titles, reporting, motivations, pain points, needs, fears,
and wants can be derived with some degree of research, the real value is in
uncovering profound unarticulated insights and not-so obvious goals that
lead to a winning customer strategy and a competitive differentiator.
This is one of the key rules that separate buyer personas from being a
customer profiling exercise to a means of providing senior executives with
the informed insights they need to make sound decisions about customer
strategy. As mentioned previously, it takes the right people with the right
skills to go into this foreign territory.
It is my belief that in the near future, organizations will have specialists who
are hybrids of customer strategists, ethnographers, and anthropologist who
engage in buyer insight for the purpose of informing strategy. The near
future is not that far off as forward thinking organizations such as Intel, HP,
and Starbucks continuously seek the unarticulated and the not-so obvious.
19. The quest for information can be addicting. In organizations where the
leadership is mostly analytical in nature, the need for information and
analysis can be interwoven into the corporate culture and is a component of
every decision. When it comes to markets and customers, quantitative
analysis of many shapes and forms are used to arrive at customer data. You
may have recently sat in a presentation whereby you reviewed results of
online surveys, viewed multiple pie charts segmenting data, analyzed
customer data reports generated in multi-variant ways, and purchased
industry related reports with a chockfull of relevant data. Several years ago,
the futurist John Naisbitt came up with this quote:
“ “We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”
The sixth rule related to buyer persona development is about distinguishing
information from insight:
Rule 6: Buyer Persona Development is not a Quantitative Process
One of the pitfalls of buyer persona development in an analytical oriented
organization is that it could be dropped into the market research area and
undergoes a transformation into a quantitative research project. A cognitive
dissonance occurs over sampling sizes in quantitative areas such as market
research. A question that often leads to this transformation is: How could a
buyer persona development initiative with a sample size of 40 to 50 possibly
offer the same validity of performing surveys on a sample size of 1,000?
20. What happens is that you wind up with reams and reams of information but
the knowledgeable insights that are gleamed from qualitative and
experiential analysis is missing. Thus, the results lack contextual reference of
exactly what the goals of the buyer personas may be. My colleague Angela
Quail and I saw this happen firsthand. Six figures were dropped onto such a
project in an organization we helped afterwards. Buyer persona “profiles”
were created and they consisted of many data points pulled from a
quantitative effort of sending out surveys as well as creating online
surveys. It was clear that there were usability issues with the crafted
profiles since sales and portions of marketing rejected them.
A hard lesson learned. However, it is important to note that the qualitative
aspects of buyer persona development complement the quantitative aspects
of market research in two ways. First, insights derived during buyer persona
development can point the way towards opportunities that need to be
explored and validated quantitatively. For example, during the insights
gathering, uncovered is a promising new market potential. Market research
can go to work then trying to figure out what the size of the market may be
and validate the potential. The second can be when market research has
identified a market with valid potential but the picture of the identified buyer
segment is blurry. Executives can utilize buyer persona development to
“humanize” the buyer segment, gain clarity on buyer goals, and determine
what the appropriate strategies for customer engagement are.
22. When MS Excel came into existence many years ago, it was a significant leap
in computing power. The uses for MS Excel have grown far beyond the basic
computations it was designed for. Graphs, tables, charts, matrixes and the
likes are all very common to what people can now do with MS Excel. You can
add data into many rows and columns almost infinitum it seems.
It also seems that in the concept of buyer personas, there has been
misguided efforts to engage in an oversimplified process of creating a
composite of many data points. The outcome being buyer personas
resembling a wire mesh of columns and rows that have every conceivable bit
of information on the “what” of a buyer persona. This leads me to the next
rule:
Rule 7: Avoid Building a Wire Mesh of Data Points When Creating Buyer
Personas
It is a natural tendency to layer data on top of data. We desire to find out as
much as possible about a buyer persona. When the wire mesh effect
happens it is a result of three problems:
Buyer persona creation is viewed as a composite profiling exercise and not a
development process with distinct stages.
There is a lack of qualitative and experiential analysis that provides deep
insight thus a reliance on finding as many data points as possible via internal
or survey oriented vehicles.
23. An over emphasis on what buyer personas do versus on the insight that can
inform customer strategy. The downside to the wire mesh effect is that it
perpetuates the attempt to fit buyers and segments into neat boxes. This
type of approach creates a counter to the value of buyer personas which is to
gain deep insights into buyer’s goals that are translated into informing
customer strategies.
The wire mesh effect on building buyer personas as oppose to viewing buyer
personas as a development process results in a poor foundation on which to
make informed decisions in many areas. Both the B2C and the B2B world are
changing extremely fast as digital marketing and social media
evolves. Creating buyer personas resembling a wire mesh can leave you on
the outside looking in.
25. An interesting show to watch is Extreme Makeover Home Addition. It is
quite an amazing process when they can take what looks like hopeless
situations and turn dilapidated houses into dream homes. Have you ever
noticed where they typically start with a house about to be made over? Ty
Pennington, one of the stars and host of Extreme Makeover, can often be
found starting the show in the basement of the house selected for an
Extreme Makeover episode. Ty is checking for structural issues, leaks, shifts
in the soil, the wiring, and many other areas related to the determining how
solid the foundation is for the house. It is not surprising that in many
episodes, they wind up razing the entire house and building new as a result of
the foundation being weak.
When it comes to the process of buyer persona development, one of the
rules that are foundational to creating a buyer persona is:
Rule 8: Goal-Centered Qualitative and Experiential Analysis is the
Foundation of Buyer Persona Development
To redo a house as in Extreme Makeover, it begins as a process with very
distinct stages. In other words you cannot put up a roof until you have a
foundation and the frame of the house has been established. Similarly, with
buyer personas, they can be created with tremendous meaning when they
are grounded in qualitative and experiential analysis that is focused on buyer
goals and have been created through a process-oriented methodology that
also has distinct stages.
26. The buyer persona itself is meant to be an archetype of buyer goals that are
derived from foundational qualitative and experiential analysis with real and
potential customers. They in of themselves are not the end means. In many
ways, the process of creating them is far more relevant to informing goal
centered customer strategy than the actual buyer persona itself. This
concept is very foundational to the origins of personas as well when personas
were a means to inform goal directed design strategy and served as the
communication vehicle and archetype of user goals.
In the next few years, it is my belief that the need for buyer persona
strategists will grow and that the pendulum will swing back to the origins of a
goal centered approach to buyer persona development. Executives will see
tremendous value in the foundation of qualitative and experiential analysis in
informing them on evolving buyer goals and behaviors. Which will serve as
foundational guidance for making important decisions respective to customer
strategy. Buyer persona strategists of the future will become a unique
specialty in the sense that it will require the convergence of attributes and
skill sets in the areas of strategy, ethnography, anthropology, sociology, and
qualitative analysis.
27. Purpose is to Inform Goal
Centered Customer Strategies
28. When the compass was invented by the Chinese during the Qin dynasty
(221-206 B.C), it radically changed civilizations and ushered in many years
later the Age of Exploration in the 15th century. Just as the invention of the
printing press created the advent of knowledge and information being made
available to the masses, the compass meant civilizations were given the tool
to explore. The compass allowed travelers and explorers to know what
direction they were headed with a good degree of certainty. This simple tool
spurred on civilizations coming in contact with each other, trade, and the
introduction of goods never before seen. In the modern world, GPS
Technology is now becoming so commonplace that we not only know in what
direction to go, we also know where others are.
The buyer persona development process has an important rule related to the
compass:
Rule 9: The Purpose of the Buyer Persona Development Process is to Inform
on Goal Centered Customer Strategies
For senior executives today, there is a vast wilderness of the digital and social
world yet to be explored fully. Buyer behaviors and buyer goals are changing
rapidly with many changes happening around the globe by the time you finish
reading this sentence.
29. The buyer persona development process is meant to be informing and
exploratory. The process of buyer persona development provides insights
and direction for senior planners to create strategies for customer
engagement that meet buyer’s goals and also meet buyers where they are
located in the digital world.
A few years ago we were working with an organization that was perplexed by
a drop in revenues from a specific segment of their customer base. What we
now know as being a part of buyer behavior in the modern world, we saw a
glimpse of back then. That is, those buyers wanted available resources to do
research on a product/service to meet specific goals before the intervention
of sales. The company implemented a unique content and subject matter
expertise strategy that met buyer’s need for information and resources
available at their fingertips. This early adoption of content marketing turned
the tide and they saw revenues regained and grow. The buyer persona
development process gave them insightful information on where buyers were
headed, how it was impacting their business, and what strategies they could
incorporate to meet buyer’s goals.
The buyer persona development process holds the promise of being a senior
executive’s compass for shaping future strategies for customer engagement,
digital marketing, and for growing top line revenues.
31. Some of the great orators of our time had the gifted ability to communicate
as well as rally an entire nation. One of the most gifted was Winston
Churchill. His “we shall fight them on the beaches” and “this is our finest
hour” speeches rallied the entire British nation and Allied forces in the epic
fight against Nazi domination in World War II. Those speeches were born out
of Winston Churchill’s many years of political service and his intimate
knowledge of the British people. He knew how to tell a story about his own
people.
For senior level executives today, the need for a rallying speech of the
century may not be that pressing but they need to rally personnel around a
deep understanding of customers and buyers like never before. The 10th and
final rule:
Rule 10: Buyer Persona Development Serves as a Communications Platform
to Tell the Story of Customers and Buyers
10 A struggle for any CEO is to communicate the story of how the organization
can and will best serve the goals of it’s’ buyers. How to interweave this story
into the daily mechanisms of an entity can be a challenge and an epic one at
that. Buyer personas, derived from a rich and robust process of getting to
know customers and buyers experientially, can serve as the media for
executives to tell the story about their buyers and how their company will
help to continue the story.
32. It has been a privilege to tell the story of the 10 rules for creating a buyer
persona. These rules are a reflection of over a decade of contributing to
persona development in general and taking the first step in 2002 towards
making persona development a useful process for sales and marketing when I
asked the question: “why not buyer personas?” (See article The Origins of
Buyer Personas) The term “buyer persona” has been popularized over the
last four years in particular and taking on many different meanings. It is my
hope that these rules will serve as guidance for understanding the
foundational principles of buyer persona development as a process and
methodology for understanding buyers.
10
33. Produced By:
Tony Zambito
10 Rules
President & CEO For
Goal Centric
www.goalcentric.com Buyer
www.buyerpersonainsights.com
Copyright 2010
Persona
Goal Centric Management, Inc. Development