What the bleep is a buyer persona

Thank you for asking – this is definitely my favorite topic.

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience – an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers can use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers. Imagine how effective marketers could be if we would all stop making stuff up and start aligning our messages and programs with the way real people think.

I certainly didn't invent this idea -- I've just seen it at work and am now a huge advocate. Design engineers frequently build user personas as a part of their product development process. The application of personas for marketing is less common, but hardly without precedent. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush successfully campaigned to the soccer mom persona during the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections. By 2004, the soccer mom had morphed into a security mom persona as school violence and terrorism became big issues. The Presidents' campaign staffs used dozens of  personas like these to focus their messages and win more votes.

I hope that my use of political examples doesn't suggest that you need a huge budget for this to work. I know marketers in companies of every size who are building buyer persona profiles through informal methods that cost next to nothing. They started by seeing every on-line or in-person interaction with a potential buyer as an opportunity to listen and identify patterns. I started this blog so that I could communicate with marketers who are interested in using personas to think more strategically about how to go to market. I'll be talking about examples and practices that anyone can implement. Please contact me if you find something useful that I can include here.

Comments

[Adele]

Great question, Mimi. Don't worry, you are not alone. In fact many marketers find themselves in the situation you're in now -- working with a product that someone inside the company thought was a good idea. But no one has really worked through the go-to-market implications. This is a perfect example of a place to use the ideas I'm talking about around personas.

[Mimi]

Hi Adele, great stuff on the buyer persona. After taking the Pragmatic Marketing class this has really helped open my eyes. Question....I've been given a product that is mostly built and my job is to validate the market opportunity. Yes -- not quite the right order but we are hoping to approach this with Buyer Personas. Do you think the Buyer persona process still works when the product is mostly built for a suspected target market?

[Jacob Sikais]

I first came across the buyer persona a few days ago reading 'The New Rules of Marketing & PR'... looking forward to learning more on how to properly apply these new sets of rules.