1.10
Buyer Personas
A composite fictional buyer with a name, age, role and frustrations, built so a team has a concrete person to design and write for.
Alan Cooper (1998), imported into marketing from interaction design
What it does
Turns an abstract audience into something a team can argue about specifically. Its real work is internal: it stops six people in a room each picturing a different buyer, and it gives a writer someone to address instead of a category.
When it breaks
It breaks the moment the fiction is treated as evidence. Personas are typically built from a handful of interviews and then used to exclude: this campaign is not for her, that channel is not where he is. Because competing brands largely share the same buyers, a persona used to exclude is excluding people who already buy from you. The failure is silent: nobody audits the customers a persona quietly wrote off.
Case
Ehrenberg-Bass's duplication of purchase work finds that a brand shares its buyers with every other brand in the category in proportion to those brands' size, not with a distinct persona-shaped subgroup. A persona that describes an exclusive buyer type is describing a population that the purchase data does not contain.
Ehrenberg-Bass · Brands invariably share buyers with competitors in line with size ↗In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
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