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 21st 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 3rd 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 3rd 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 3rd 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 3rd 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
