1.10
Buyer Personas
A composite fictional buyer — name, age, role, 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 ↗Diagram — not yet drawn
A persona card drawn in detail on the left; on the right the actual buyer base as a broad scatter, with the sliver the persona describes shaded and the rest — the majority — left blank and labelled with what it is worth.
In the wild
Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment
What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.
Loading…