Personas tell their story, but to whom

The core message and URL for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (customer relationship management) campaign are right on target, but IMHO Microsoft missed a step (or two) when they built the content at EveryoneGetsIt.com.

The site is organized around five videos, one for each of the buyer personas that influences the CRM  decision. Launch the video associated with Lisa and she introduces herself as a “typical marketing manager" and tells you all about her problems. Throughout this dissertation she wiggles and gestures. If the body language isn't bad enough, she complains that she is struggling to justify her “fictional spend” (please, somebody, tell me that I heard this wrong). Then she sums up her whole list of issues by telling us that solving them is “worse than yoga.”

Say what?

I know a lot of smart people at Microsoft who “get it” about personas, and I know that their CRM offering looks just like Outlook, which would get my attention if I were looking for a solution right now. But I’ve seen several thousand marketing managers in the Effective Product Marketing seminar over the last seven years. Fully half are men, and none of them would last a minute in their jobs if they behaved or talked like Lisa. So my first complaint is that the people who built EveryoneGetsIt don’t get it about the marketing manager persona.

Of equal concern is the way this site uses personas. Buyer personas are a tool for use inside the company. Lisa’s persona write-up may include the fact that she finds yoga challenging, but only if that fact will help the site's designers and writers find something compelling to say or show to Lisa. We are asking too much of buyer personas when we expect them to tell their story to the real people they represent. Everyone is unique, and no example can ever match the way any individual thinks or speaks. Even professional impersonators fail to impress the people they imitate.

I absolutely recommend the use of buyer personas as an internal tool for developing web content. If you need detailed guidance on the topic of personas and web content, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg at Future Now “get it” about how to do that. Steve Mulder gets it too – you can read his book “The User is Always Right, a Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web”. And I know there are people at Microsoft who know about personas -- maybe one of them will help the people at EveryoneGetsIt to get poor LIsa.

Comments

[Peter Tennis]

Boy, this hurts to watch. The first thing this presentation does is take my eyes of the product and focus on the person that says, "I am a typical...". I am not typical. I am excellent. If I was typical, I wouldn't be working on billion dollar plus organizations. The semantics in these videos, though trying to draw a customer nearer to the product, actually drive them farther away.

[Andy]

Interesting review - I would have to agree. Lisa was a complete turn off and embarrassment to anyone in marketing.

[CRM Solutions]

If you as a small business want to leverage CRM you really need to create campaigns based around existing customers and their behaviours.

[Scott Sehlhorst]

Great critique! Really astonishing that professionals would take such a condescending approach to thinking about their users and buyers.

I believe that they also have mixed up the notion of buyer persona and user persona - they have the buyer persona talking about her issues with using the tool, not her perceptions of what capabilities or features are needed to solve problems. So, messed up on two fronts.

I go into more detail (http://tynerblain.com/blog/2008/07/22/buyers-and-users/ ), and would love to get your thoughts (both Adelle and her readers!) and feedback about my interpretation of the differences between buyer personas and user personas.

Thanks again for the inspiring post.

[Jeffrey Eisenberg]

Adele,

Thanks for the compliment. Here's a link to the archive of our blog for Personas http://www.grokdotcom.com/category/personas/