Buyer Persona Insights

Buyer Persona 2.0 - Power of Buyer Insight

During the previous decade, we’ve seen a growing acceptance for the use of buyer personas to help guide effective product, sales, and marketing planning.  The basic premise of their importance to the new world order of 21^st century marketing has certainly taken root and is sprouting.  As we enter into this new decade, it is prudent to enter into the next generation of buyer persona concepts.

One of the dilemmas that the buyer persona concept faced in the previous decade is that, like any new concept that comes along, it had its fair share of misconceptions.  To address misconceptions and to evolve, a crucial cocktail mix of art and science must come together to create the next generation practicum and discipline - Buyer Persona 2.0.  This mix has to come together in such a way that senior leaders in corporations today are able to rely on the buyer persona discipline as an essential ingredient that informs on strategic means of meeting the buying needs of their customers.  What does this brew look like and what misconceptions need to be dispelled?  Here is one basic tenet, one of several I hope to write about in a series on Buyer Persona 2.0, that we have learned firsthand through working with Fortune 100 clients since 2002:

Buyer Insight

Over the past few years, there have been many who have written about or mentioned buyer personas in various sources.  Espoused is the notion that all that is needed is to have a few people sit back and think about whom your buyer is, come up with a picture, and viola’ – a buyer persona has been created.  Or, we have witnessed the debate whether marketing should talk to sales when crafting buyer personas.  Some have written that all you need to do is go to a few of your best sales people and have them come up with a buyer persona composite you can use.  Unfortunately, this has created a misconception that buyer insight is not essential to crafting buyer personas.  In part, just the mere omission of mentioning some level of insight gathering has made this key tenet missing in action.  It also has caused senior leaders, rightfully so, to be dubious about the value of buyer personas. 

What then is meant by gathering Buyer Insight?  To gain a deeper understanding of buyers and their buying processes, an understanding that yields insight, companies need to engage in a level of qualitative interaction with their buyers.  The goal of buyer insight is to reach the deep layer of the unarticulated and the not yet seen.  Crafting user personas for the design of products require a significant degree of observational and ethnographic based research.  Buyer personas require the same significant degree of insight gathering however the focus is different than that of user personas.  In many ways, the insight gathering is anthropological in nature.  Meaning there is an emphasis on attitudinal perceptions, causal relationships, and organization cultural phenomenon.   

At hand, is the quandary of who should be doing the Buyer Insight gathering?  First, let’s establish that it takes a set of attributes, skills, and experience to be effective at garnering profound insight.  Someone adept at “connecting the dots” and formulating a visual mental picture is crucial.  Often times, the very people who possess these set of competencies may be in positions of leadership internally and are not ideally suited to do the actual insight gathering.  It is my belief that in order to achieve the unvarnished insight that can lead to innovation as well as a competitive upper hand, organizations should utilize experienced 3^rd party expertise for gathering buyer insight and crafting buyer personas.  Over the past decade, we’ve learned several reasons why this is important:

· Authenticity:  In the many interviews with buyers we’ve conducted, my colleague Angela Quail and I have seen a very consistent result.  When buyer’s know that we are representing a specific company or are under the impression we are from the company, the discussions are filtered though a lens of guarded precepts that hinder the insight gathering.  Time after time, when we’ve gone into various markets to interview buyers and made it clear we were objective 3^rd party interests; we have been able to gain significantly more insights.  There is an expressed promise of confidentiality exercised, thus freeing the buyers interviewed to be candid and forthcoming.

· Product-centric:  There are still very many organizations that have not made the transition to a buyer-centric model of engagement.  Buyers today are even more stringent in their gate keeping efforts to keep product-centric sales people at bay.  This includes keeping product managers and marketers gated as well.  Product-centric communications will make it difficult for any member of the organization to remove the barrier of a perceived ulterior motive, right or wrong, to “sell more products” in an attempt to gather insights.  To echo one buyer we interviewed on behalf of a client – “I don’t care who calls or leaves a message, it’s all the same to me – they are just calling to push an x on me.  I don’t have time for that.” 

· Expertise:  As mentioned above, there is a degree of attributes, skills, and experience needed to gather buyer insights.   The challenge is making capable the many marketers with the right set of competency to do it right.  Not doing it right is akin to walking through a field of landmines.  Stepping on one could result in a very disgruntled buyer.  A 3^rd party also can be an effective means for building in-house competency as they work alongside qualified individuals to teach on the qualitative nature of gathering buyer insight.   

· Forest and Trees:  There have been many occasions whereby we’ve seen patterns replicated across several industries.  In working with senior executives, this has proven to be of tremendous value in gaining their acceptance of buyer persona methodology as a means for informing strategic direction.  Effectively lending credence to the discipline by showing related relevance to other industries and what profound insights were yielded.  More importantly, how companies responded to the insights and the results attained.  Even in gathering buyer insights, tunnel vision can be prevalent if done in-house.  Alan Cooper who founded the use of personas for the design of digital products and who introduced me to the concept of personas, used to talk about the risk of a product designer being self-referential in their design as well as interpretation of user feedback.  I believe this can be true, not in all cases, for organizations as a whole in interpreting buyer feedback.

The more complex the sales and marketing environment, the more I advocate for 3^rd party intervention in gathering underlying buyer insight that will help to shape the future direction of an organization.  Insight that will lead to buyer personas that are believable and real.  Buyer Insight is the essential starting point and the most crucial of the tenets for Buyer Persona 2.0.   

Next: Buyer Persona 2.0 Part II

 

The Origin of Buyer Personas

As we begin a new decade, it is amazing to think how the term buyer persona has become part of the lexicon of business language.  I am often asked by clients, colleagues, friends, and family – where did the idea or the term buyer persona come from?  Like most watershed moments in life, there is an origin that exists which can sometimes get lost in the timeline of progress.  In the use of the term buyer persona, I believe such is the case. 

Before a focus on the origin of the term and concept, it is important to grapple with how we have reached this point.  The term and concept has grown through actual work on the part of leading edge organizations and some terrific writing as well as teaching on the topic of buyer personas.  There are four people in my opinion who have contributed the most to the awareness of buyer personas in companies today.  Through our firm Goal Centric, my colleague Angela Quail and I have been involved in over 20 engagements during the past few years where we have focused on the “how” of buyer personas.  Each engagement pushed us to innovate and to continue to evolve the concept of buyer personas as an important component of strategic sales and marketing discipline.  In addition, we have written and presented on the topic of buyer personas.  The Buyer Persona blog written by Adele Revella of Pragmatic Marketing has also made the term much more visible and Adele has written very thought provoking postings on why buyer personas are important to product managers as well as sales and marketing professionals.  In his bestselling book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott (also of Pragmatic Marketing heritage) devotes considerable space on buyer personas and their importance to the new rules of the 21^st century.  The fact that his book has become a best seller has undoubtedly propelled the term buyer persona into widespread recognition. 

Though each of us has contributed to the awareness of buyer personas, none of us can claim the exact origin.  It resides with one man and one man only – Alan Cooper.  Alan is considered and revered by many as the founding father of personas and their use for the interaction design of digital products and mediums.  My colleague Angela Quail and I had the privilege of working with Alan Cooper, through his esteemed Cooper Interaction Design firm (now called Cooper), and to learn firsthand about personas.  In March of 1999, Alan published his highly acclaimed first edition of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, a provocative look at how software programmers and engineers were in charge of designing products and services that were by and large – non-user friendly.  It is in this book that Alan first describes the use of personas to design very user friendly digital products.  On page 135 of this landmark book, Alan begins to point out that personas are “user personas and not buyer personas” when referencing the use of personas in the design of digital products.  Essentially making the case personas should be used to design for the user as opposed for the buyer.   Hence, we can mark the exact origin of the term buyer persona in the annals of modern business history. 

I was fixated on that passage line.  Being a student of Peter Drucker, I asked the important question Mr. Drucker stated must be solved at reaching sound decisions – why not?  As in -why not create buyer personas?  As a former Vice President of Sales and Marketing for three organizations, I couldn’t help but think – now if I only had information, via personas on buying customers, what successes could we have achieved?  This was a gravitational pull on my thinking in the time I helped out at Alan’s design firm.  This also served as the genesis for Angela Quail and I to ponder the “why not” question with full force.  (A little known footnote to this story happened in 2000-2001.  Both Pragmatic Marketing and Forrester Research solicited from several people at Cooper, including myself and Alan, information on personas.  Personas have become a staple component of Pragmatic Marketing’s course offerings while Forrester has used personas extensively in its web design analysis offerings.)   

After the dot com bust that took place in the early 2000’s as well as the after affects of 9/11, Cooper Interaction Design was not immune to the need to scale back considerably and go into survival mode.  They have survived to this date and are the preeminent design firm in the country in my humble opinion.   In 2002, I formed the firm Goal Centric, stumbled out of the gate, ruffled some feathers inadvertently, and then found footing with my colleague Angela.  We’ve crossed the great divide so to peak – from user persona methodology to carving out a specific methodology related to buyer personas.  It has taken some courageous organizations, such as FedEx, HP, and Reed Elsevier, to be pioneers evolving buyer personas into a strategic component of sales and marketing planning.  We’ve come a long way in answering the question – why not buyer personas?   

I have purposely used the above titled heading out of respect for Alan’s definitive article The Origin of Personas written in August of 2003.  Although I haven’t spoken to him in several years, I hope he will not mind being called the Grand Daddy of all personas.  His invention was brilliant and all those using personas today should pay homage to the man who started it all.  We would not be able to utilize the concept of personas had it not been for Alan Cooper giving us its origins and the basic persona building structure.

Next: The future of buyer personas

"Accidental Branding" - a not so accidental book review

Do you ever get the feeling that most good things happen by accident?  Somewhere in your career, I am sure that after long weeks and long hours, it all seemed hopeless that this "breakthrough" you were working on just wasn't going to happen.  And, of course, you pick up the paper and read of this marvelous success story of a company that has grown astronomically in the past two or three years and find that it all happened by "accident."  No business plan, no major marketing plan and strategy, no thought given to branding, and etc.  In your head you scream: "what luck!"

If you relate to this, you should check out David Vinjamuri's new book Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands. In David's book, he covers such entrepreneurs as:

• Craig Newmark of Craig's List;
• John Peterman of J.Peterman Company;
• Gary Erickson of Cliff Bar;
• Gert Boyle of Columbia Sportswear;
• Roxanne Quimby of Burt's Bees;
• Julie Aigner-Clark of Baby Einstein;
• and Myrian Zaoui and Erik Malka of The Art of Shaving

All of these people were entrepreneurs who David points out enjoyed "accidental branding" success and were not minted MBA types who succeeded.  Some were downright eccentric in their personalities and beliefs also.  So, was all of their success truly an accident?  If you judge by virtue of conventional wisdom, as David says, you could say this all was accidental.  However, if you look at what traits do these entrepreneurs possess in their pursuits, you can see a different picture.  In fact, you can see a picture of extraordinary traits that led to their success.

What types of "persona insights" might we pick up from David's book about these people?  David highlights a few:

• Yes, there was lots and lots of luck involved - so let's get that out of the way first
• They each experienced the problem they were trying to solve
• They knew how to be their own customer
• They were perfectionists and "do sweat the small details"
• They had faith and persisted
• They were very good storytellers

David points out that they were very good at "listening to customers and breaking the rules." 

It brought to mind for me my own remembrance of visiting Jeff Skoll at eBay when they only had 20 employees.  Jeff and I worked together at Knight-Ridder for two years and had become frequent lunch buddies.  Jeff was the first President of eBay and I remembering seeing a "war room" they had, with helmets and fake guns, to go after their competitors.  And, I remember hearing him tell me how Pierre Omidyar started this company trying to help his fiance' find PEZ dispensers and PEZ collectors to trade with her own PEZ collection.  The plan was still quite casual and they were "experiencing" it and making it up along the way.  Well, I think they did pretty well!  And core to their success was a basic principled belief that they shared.  That was, that humans were fundamentally good and honest and that given a medium to auction and trade, they would be good to each other.

This is a fun yet insightful read and David has an engaging style of writing that will keep you turning the page.