Adele Revella in her engaging Buyer Persona Blog points to a recent number of controversial comments made about the value of personas in general. In many ways, what bloggers such as the Cranky PM, Saeed Khan's On Product Management, and Kristin Zhivago are saying is - "so what" about personas. In their various ways, there is some degree of truth in what each is saying. A persona alone can cause misunderstanding and can cause a "so what" reaction if they are not properly researched and more importantly, if they are not tied to specific scenarios. My business partner, Angela Quail, and I have been involved with personas since 1999 where we were privileged to be in on the early days of personas at Alan Cooper's interaction design firm. What always struck me as powerful were not the personas themselves but the scenarios. Since 2002, Angela and I have focused on bringing personas and scenario development to sales and marketing through our firm Goal Centric.
In our experience, we've seen this common pitfall of where people believe that the creation of the persona alone is the end means. This is not the case. Sadly to say, there are personas being crafted without the rigorous research and study required. Thus, you are bound to get a “so what” reaction on poorly researched and designed personas. We've also seen the "one size" fits all mentality brought to personas. The notion that a “single” persona can be used by all departments is usually not ideal. For instance, there are substantial differences in how you create user personas compared with buyer personas. Usage scenarios also differ greatly from buying scenarios. Another consideration is that of channels. Forrester, through the gracious sharing of information and content from the likes of firms such as Cooper, has entirely focused their analyst attention on what I call the "web-based" persona. How you create buyer personas for certain channels and situational diverse buying scenarios is a difference maker in terms of personas having real value. Although not always a hard rule, a buyer persona you may have crafted for your web channel may not translate very well to a buyer persona who may deal exclusively with your direct sales channel.
Angela and I liken our efforts with clients to putting “personas in action”. This means to take the researched-based buyer personas and put them in action through buying process scenarios. Without the buying process scenario, you cannot know how a buyer persona will engage with an organization’s marketing and sales efforts. Conversely, you will not have the insight necessary to design your sales and marketing efforts to map back to the behaviors and motivations that are uncovered in scenario development. In a product usage scenario, what come out of scenarios are the essential product requirements. In a buying process scenario, what are defined are the critical buying criteria and values that must be met.
The resulting actionable insight is that sales and marketing can understand buyer goals and motivations and also know how they play out in the buying process. Anticipating and meeting buyer goals helps an organization provide customers with rewarding buying and customer experiences.
It is exciting to see how far user and buyer persona development has come in the last decade. That being said, there is still tremendous room for improvement in ensuring that high quality research-based creation of personas is maintained and professionally developed. The value of personas continues to be recognized as the means of getting to know customers at a deeper level. When crafted with rigorous quality research and synchronized with the equally skilled craft of scenario development, user and buyer personas can align not only sales, marketing, and product management but align the organization tightly with its customers.
