This is the final article looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future. Let’s recap the significant buyer trends noted so far in this series:
Buyer Trend: Buyers desire rewarding human experiences
The concept of Experience in business has undergone a roller coaster ride during the past ten to fifteen years since it was first introduced. Both the terms customer experienceand buyer experience taking on different meanings in this time period. For buyers in general, there has been a slow but progressing convergence of desiring B2C like experiences in B2B market worlds. Without question, the rise of the Internet and Social Technologies has shaped and reshaped our concept of Experience in general. I believe we are at a pivotal moment in business history with respect to buyer behavior and experience.
This pivotal moment is centered on the idea that buyers desire human experiences in the business world and see experience as a two-sided coin. The two key principles of experience in the modern Social Age are:
Contextual: the overriding foundation of customer and buyer experience is engaging existing customers and prospective buyers in relevant contextual experiences – whether they are in social mediums, conversations, or interactions.
Learning: rising as an essential component of experience in business is the growing expectations on the part of buyers that undergoing an experience also mean they will learn from the experience. Knowledge and practical intelligence will be gained by entering into the experience.
Buyers today are redefining the meaning of business experience. Consequently, integrating their business experience into how buyers are reshaping their human experience in general as a result of the Social Age. Buyers not only want to “feel good” about the business experiences they undergo, but now also have a higher expectations they will take away knowledge they did not have before.
The seven buyer trends in this article series point to what I call The Buyer Circle of Experience. As they reshape their definition of what a business experience means and integrate it into their human experience, buyers are expanding their circle of experience in a business context. The totality of their humanized buyer experience including what has been covered in this Buyerology Trend series:
To undergo rewarding and fulfilling experiences
To be understood qualitatively – in human terms and not data terms
To enable their quest to fulfill knowledge needed; not be seen as object for demand generation
To enhance collaborative experiences with expanding buyer networks
To be enabled to make informed decisions that align with organizational decision models versus generic buying process views
To grow their intelligence and in essence grow their knowledge and practical wisdom in their respective areas and beyond
To foster the ability to meet shared corporate values, in addition to needs, as part of the business experience
A place for C-Suite leaders to start is to rethink their own concept of what experience – customer and buyer experience – means in today’s Social Age. Guiding the organization to adopt a two dimensional view of experience – contextual and learning – as opposed to one dimensional views. It will take hard work and deep customer and buyer understanding to turn B2B business engagement into humanized social experiences. This becomes a new imperative for the C-Suite. Undergoing think shift - viewing every interaction as one that must become an engaging and fulfilling experience and represent a learning experience for existing customers and prospective buyers.
The implications affect every area of businesses – talent, training, functions, technologies, operations, marketing, and sales. It will test the resolve and capabilities of business leadership as we know it today.
The Future
In the future, buyer expectations for experiences that engage them contextually and provide learning opportunities will grow. The open systems of new social technologies fueling the rise in humanizing the buyer experience. Buyers will be looking to integrate their business experience into their personal human experience.
As the millennial grows into leadership, we will see metamorphoses take place around the concept of business, organization, leadership, and shared values. This will drastically affect our notions of what is thought of as a business experience. We may very well begin to see a narrowing gap between the business experience and the human experience happen sooner than we think.
Key questions to ponder for the future are: What is your organization doing today to rethink experience and what it means? How capable is your organization of providing both engaging as well as learning experiences? How will your organization be impacted by this evolving trend?
This is the fourth article looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future. The first three covered experience creation, BIG insights, and demand fulfillment. This article looks at how buyers are developing more complex networks of interactions as well as decision-making and how organizations must adapt their view of buying.
Buyer Trend: Developing More Complex Networks That Collaborate On Decisions
As many B2B organizations know, when dealing with complex selling situations, identifying the influences on buying processes and the purchase decision is often the most difficult challenge faced by marketing and sales teams. This is doubly so as we enter a new world order of business models altered significantly by the convergence of the Internet and the Social Age. The traditional views of how business is conducted and the buyer-seller relationship operating in a vacuum are running out of steam.
A key trend that is altering the landscape of conventional buyer-seller models is buyers are developing complex networks that engage in collaboration whereby decisions are not made in isolation. The buyer network acts as a collective form of collaboration with each node of the network directly influencing purchase decisions. In addition, the buyer network is expanding. External collaborators such as partners, suppliers, communities, and valued customers are participating in the buyer network with direct influence on decisions. This emerging development makes each “node” not only an influencer but an activate participant in the purchase decision. While there still may be an ultimate buyer, the buyer is guiding each node of the buyer network in collaborating on meeting financial, technical, strategic, and productivity goals.
My work in originating buyer persona development led me to collaborate with three Fortune 100 companies on developing a Buyer Persona Ecosystem™ view of buyers. This is now evolving into what I call a Buyer Persona Network™ view. Understanding an ecosystem is the foundation for understanding how a buyer network is formed and how it behaves. One element we’ve come to learn is that a singular view of a buyer today is woefully inadequate in complex B2B marketplaces. Let me echo a recent interview with a head of sales for a large IT service provider:
“We had an opportunity with an existing customer where we knew they had about an $18m spend annually on our type of services. For the past two years we’ve been only getting about $2m of that spend. What we learned recently is that one of their key partners considered our services to be inferior. We had no idea and it really put us behind the eight ball.”
What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?
The implications that results from the emergence of buyer networks are no doubt enormous. They will shake the very foundation of our existing thinking on how buying gets conducted and how decisions are made. Today’s C-Suite will need to adjust their own views of existing customers and prospective buyers. The power of “group think” really does begin with the kool-aid organizations drink. If you are drinking a single view of a buyer and the mantra of pushing harder, then the organization will eventually pass out from this toxic mix. The modern C-Suite must enable an organization’s fundamental understanding of emerging buyer networks and adapting operations such as marketing and sales to account for this emergence. A place to start is to improve the organization’s insight as well as intelligence in two distinct areas:
Identifying relevant buyer networks for their existing customers and prospective buyers
Identifying how different scenarios impacts a buyer network and how the weighted degree of influence changes
For CMO’s and CSO’s in particular, working together on developing the mix of conversation and interaction that meets the goals of the buyer networks relevant to their industry is crucial to longevity. Buyer networks will continue to expand and grow. Not having a deep understanding of the tools used by relevant buyer networks, how buyer networks interacts, and the desired outcomes of buyer networks will in essence cause their own efforts of pushing harder to hit a brick wall. Long held perceptions about buyers and the role of influencers will begin to fade away as buyer networks and collective collaboration on buying and purchase decisions emerge.
The Future
In the future, the relationship between selling organizations and buyer networks will begin to look and relate differently than the buyer-seller relationship of the past. The buyer of the future will have a different set of skills to go along with a new mindset of collaboration. The connected buyer of the future will help to guide this new form of collaboration in ways that will no doubt change rapidly as new technologies are introduced. Engaging with such new technologies that enable collaboration amongst organizations and reshaping our thinking on existing models of business relationships.
One way for organizations to stay on top of this emerging trend is to earn a very special privilege. That privilege being to earn the right to be a participating member, or node, of relevant buyer networks. Whether it is as a supplier, partner, or even a customer themselves – there is much to learn in this new form of collective and connected collaboration. Are you ready to start learning?
This is the second in a series of articles planned on looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future. This article looks at how understanding today’s conventional and social buyers takes BIG Insights versus BIG Data
Buyer Trend: Buyer Behavior Changing Rapidly and Buyers Are Saying – Get Me Please!
Evident over the past two years are monumental shifts that are occurring in buyer behavior. We’ve seen buyers entering the buying stages in unpredictable ways and deferring direct interactions further down the buying process. There have been generational differences noted between the rise of the younger social buyer as well as hybrid behaviors of traditional buyers. Buyers at first seemingly consuming information at a rabid thirst pace while other buyer groups demonstrating content fatigue and rejecting content outright.
Rather than rehash the mountain of information that can be found about what buyers are exhibiting, suffice to say that buyers are adapting, changing, evolving, and developing new processes along the way. We know, to a degree, what buyers are doing. And data-driven marketing and BIG data has become BIG business to tell us what buyers are doing.
In the past two plus years, we are seeing a rise in the analytical push and explosion in the wont for data. This is turning into a Catch-22 dilemma for C-Suite executives. While research can be found that data-driven companies do outperform non-data driven companies, the C-Suites in corporate worlds can be drowning in data and can never hear the still voice of their existing customers and prospective buyers. This dilemma is most certainly compounding the issue of unpredictability about buyers in the future.
What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?
There is no question that the C-Suite and perhaps in particular the CMO is under constant duress to figure out how to find the right mix of products, services, and experiences that make loyal customers and wins over prospective buyers. I suspect that on any given day of the week, a C-Suite member is pouring over the data explosion taking place and attempting to decipher what insight can be useful for predicting how buyers will behave and buy.
Here’s a problem we all know business has. When it comes to looking at the future – we just do a plain bad job at it. We’ve been trained, conditioned, brainwashed, whipped, and had the fear of the devil put in to us to rely on BIG data as a way of planning and predicting the future. And to some degree, analytics and data help us to find out what buyers are most likely to do in the future. But, is BIG data on its’ own a reliable measure of outcome? While I am not certain, I am willing to guess that the 80/20 rule applies here with 80% of the C-Suite not being able to give an affirmative yes to that question.
What the C-Suite needs to do is balance the equation on finding out how to predict as well as meet buyer goals. The C-Suite of the future will come to rely on BIG insights and see such interwoven into their strategy planning. By BIG insights I refer to the qualitative nature of research that gets to the most important questions of how and why buyers behave as they do to make purchase decisions. Giving us the BIG insights that can help us to plan for a future in ways buyers have yet to envision even for themselves. The C-Suite today must add BIG insight to the equation of being informed about buyers and making sound decisions that will put them on their existing customer’s and prospective buyer’s computer or tablet screen consistently.
The problem that has always plagued BIG data is that it is an analytical view of past results – it is rooted in a past-to-present orientation. And past results are important. I am not saying they are not. What I am saying is that buyer behavior is changing so rapidly that the C-Suite must balance out the equation to attain the deep understanding of buyers that is focused on future orientation. An equation that leads to BIG insights that also shapes the organization’s future relationships with existing customers and prospective buyers
The Future
In the present and in the future, C-Suite leaders will be called to lead their organizations in distinguishing between data that is factual in nature and insights which helps to inform decisions. This is where it gets tricky. The existing dialogue about BIG data uses language about insights – and to be sure there is insight to be had quantitatively. However, there are BIG insights to be had qualitatively that propel the organization forward into a future that they co-create with existing customers and prospective buyers. The C-Suite of the future will look at shifting resources to be more balanced between quantitative data and qualitative insights that are achieved through mixed qualitative investigative methods. The quest for deeper insights will grow as it becomes the path to finding ways to differentiate in a constantly changing social world.
What buyers are saying today is pretty simple. They are saying “you are not going to get me just on numbers and facts.” Buyers are evolving a new expectation. That is, they want you to "get" them qualitatively and they want you to “get” them in ways that will help them. What I’ve discovered through qualitatively research is that while today buyers want to self-direct their own buying processes and minimize sales involvement, they are future oriented towards committing to a relationship that will help them grow.
Are you ready to invest in the BIG insights that will guide your organization to exactly what that relationship is suppose to look like?
This is the first of a series of articles planned on looking at buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future. This article looks at how buyers are seeking experiences and the new role of the C-Suite as experience creators.
Buyer Trend: Overwhelmed By Content
During the past two years, we’ve seen a significant rise in focus on content and how content is the new marketing. While some may debate that content marketing is messaging in new clothing, it is now a competency that marketing executives need to assure getting right. We’ve learned in the past few years about the value as well as the role content can play in the early stages of buying processes. In light of the heightened and almost frenzied attention paid to content marketing, there has been much written - and I’m sure internal meetings held in corporations all over the world - on the “how-to” of content creation. This has led to a crying game in the corporate halls bewailing the need for publishers and journalists to come in and help.
Content creation has become a driving force in marketing and sales organizations. So much so, buyers today are faced with the unintended consequences of information overload and content fatigue. They are often faced with the daunted task of sorting through myriads of information that will allow them to learn and hopefully help them to make an informed purchase decision. In essence, a buyer trend is evolving whereby managing and filtering information is becoming overwhelming.
Experience, as a unique form of competitive advantage, has suffered through its own identity crisis during the past decade. Customer experience has had the unintended consequences of being identified as predominantly beefing up customer service capabilities. At the same time, we have seen companies who have done admirable innovation of truly unique experiences that cut across an entire organization’s functions. What we are seeing today however is resurgence in the original intentions of The Experience Economy as put forth by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore. That is, people - be they consumers or B2B buyers - want to be part of an experience in its totality. They want to enter stage left or stage right into a theatre of experience and onto the business stage being offered.
What Must CEO’s, CMO’s, and CSO’s do?
I chose to use the word creation intentionally to label from content creation to experience creation. Both require that mixing of skill, talent, knowledge, and intuition to put forth something new and creative. What C-Suite leaders can do is begin to shift the focus from purely on content creation and lead the organization to see the context of the end game. The end game being creating experiences that provides a stage in which buyers can play a leading role. This requires new thinking. What may sound like a semantics difference is truly a corporate mind shift that must occur. While on one hand it is important to provide excellent customer experiences, on the other hand it is entirely a different matter for an organization to see themselves as experience creators.
Instilling such a mind set into corporate culture is no easy shift. Companies seeing themselves as experience creators’ means looking at content creation in terms of how it fits as an essential piece of creating an experience buyers want to be a part of. It requires the C-Suite to discover new talent that can in effect create a theatre of experience. Using the metaphor offered by Pine and Gilmore, leaders today will need to find producers of experience and find directors who are skilled at interweaving content, conversations, interactions, and roles into the production of buyer experience. Content creation can be likened to, in this metaphor, as scriptwriting. Writing content that makes the experience vision and the artful direction required come alive for buyers. The focus becoming one of creating content that fits into the overall vision of the experience and discovering, just as scriptwriters write in pauses and silence, that less can be more.
The Future
As we look to the future, the C-suite will in effect become the producers and directors of the experience theatre a company builds. Allowing buyers to participate in as well as experience a story on a business stage that unfolds and marvels them each and every time. One of my favorite theater productions has been A Chorus Line. No matter how many times I see it, I still get emotionally wrapped up in the story, the script, the music, the choreography, and the experience of the production. Organizations today must create their own version of the longest running Broadway show that buyers want to return to and revel in the experience more than once.
While the corporate hallways may be filled with talk bemoaning the need for the talents of journalists or publishers, the C-Suite who sees themselves as experience creators will have a keen eye towards finding the brilliant producing, directing, and scriptwriting talent that can build a theatre of experience. Creating a theatre of experience that builds the anticipation, engages buyers in the story, and has them talking afterwards – each and every time.
While we've seen the rise of the social consumer in the past two years reshape the concept of social currency, we are witnessing the ascent of the social buyer embracing social commerce. The B2B buyer continues to ascend and advance in the use of social technologies, networks, and commerce that are radically changing the notion of business as usual. We are seeing the birth of a new era in B2B commerce that is more social, more connected, and more humanized.
The B2B buyer, for decades, has engaged in primarily offline buying activities. With the advent of the Internet, we began to see the first shifts in online buyer behaviors influencing how plans and decisions were made in a B2B context. As the constant motion of the social age evolves, offline and online buying activities are blending into a myriad of new buying behaviors that are yet to be defined clearly. Like a lens, we are still trying to focus the picture on seeing clearing today as well as into the future how these new social buying behaviors will change B2B commerce as we know it.
A New Social Engagement Index
One of the more interesting developments in the ascent of the social buyer has been the new expectations of social engagement. In recent ethnographic studies I've conducted, where I am talking with B2B purchasers and decision-makers, I am witnessing conversationally the new threshold of what we may call a company’s Social Engagement Index. What I mean is an index of how a company is perceived in its’ efforts to utilize social technologies, networks, and etc. to advance its’ relationship with their buyers. The important discovery here is that how a company is perceived to be engaging socially is beginning to influence the willingness to enter into a B2B relationship.
This insight brings back into focus the topic I recently wrote about – turning b2b buying into a social experience. It is becoming more evident that not only do B2B buyers – as social buyers – desire more humanized social experiences; they are beginning to manifest it into an expectation. This has profound implications for B2B businesses to think about remapping strategically how they align their efforts to engage with social buyers. A tough assignment when the picture is yet not as clear as desired on knowing exactly how to do this. B2B companies do know however that they must learn for the risk of being caught flat footed is too great.
Social Experience Becoming More Meaningful
One thing we can count on is that B2B social experiences are taking on meaningful contexts in terms of how buyers select who they choose to engage with for advancing their own causes – whether they be for finding solutions to challenges or how it helps them in the advancement of their careers. I especially note here how social buyers have introduced the more humanized element of a social connection that plays into how they perceive doing business with a certain company. The social buyer taking into account how a business will help them, within a social world, to advance their careers and how they think others will perceive the decisions they make.
Social Experiences Counting as Social Capital
This is an interesting development because it blends into a concept long held in consumer psychology and sociology. That is consumer purchases are made within a realm of how it helps identify who we are as well as the statement it may make to others about who we are. We may be beginning to see how this type of social psychology is becoming more prominent a factor in the B2B buying world and for the social buyer. Who the social buyer chooses to engage with and the statement their decisions make becoming a reflection of their identity as well as social capital for advancing.
Who is the Social Buyer Persona?
Answering this question definitively is going to take some time and you can count on it shifting constantly. What we do know is that a few things are beginning to come into a fuzzy picture – and I use fuzzy because we are only in the infancy of the social age – that help us to get a better idea of who the social buyer persona is:
Social buyers are exhibiting new behaviors resulting from the new remix of offline and online buying activities
Social buyers are beginning to internalize a Social Engagement Index calculator as they investigate businesses and relationships
Social buyers are desiring more humanized social experiences
Social buyer’s identity and affinity are factors in whom they choose to enter business relationships with
There is most definitely much more to learn. The ascent of the social buyer is real and it is being reflected in how social experiences and social commerce is having an influence on buying behaviors and purchase decisions. As mentioned before, the efforts of B2B companies will need to focus on how they remap their business models, functions, and social engagement capabilities to become the social business that B2B buyers are expecting.
This is the fifth and final part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas in the social age. Leading up to this final part, part 1 through 4, I covered some of the misconceptions, impact of the social age, what changes were needed, and the establishing of a new role and framework. In this final reflection, I offer 6 essentials to embedding buyer personas into your organization.
In part 4, I described a new role of Social Buyer Behaviorist and Anthropologist that can reside in a framework of researching buyer behavior through anthropological means. A return to the origins and original meaning of buyer personas that was lost as the term went viral. It is worth reiterating that buyer persona research, since its origins, is meant to be coupled with social science research methods of anthropology and ethnography. Whereby the archetype buyer persona created represents an interface to the research conducted.
There are 6 essential guiding premises that will help to embed true buyer persona research into your organization and to do so where you are not merely creating buyer profiles but are performing the bona fide practice of buyer persona research:
Do The Real Thing
If you are able to build an in-house practice, bring on people who have the requisite background in anthropology and ethnographic research. Several Fortune 100 companies, such as Intel, have moved in this direction in the past decade. These organizations are employing a team of anthropologists and ethnographers to continuously research consumer or buyer behavior. Often times, performing in-house or through the use of an experienced third party schooled in anthropological methods, developing user or buyer personas to help be the interface to their research.
What if you do not have the means or resources to build an in-house practice that conducts the research and creates interfacing personas for the research? Then a third-party option should be explored. The key is to distinguish from those who claim they do buyer personas from real practitioners versed in anthropology and ethnographic research. As the terms personas and buyer personas went viral, there have been many who say they build buyer personas but do no to very little research. This is a clear indicator that they are building consumer or buyer profiles based on a quick gathering of client data. Essentially they are providing another profile building method and incorrectly labeling them as buyer personas. It is important to look at the track record of experience in having conducted anthropological inspired research and being able to translate into buyer personas that inform on business models, buyer strategies, meeting market or competitive challenges, and adaptive strategies. Informing on adaptive strategies is becoming critical as many companies are faced with adapting to new buyer behaviors and new social dynamics as a result of the evolving social age.
Commit To The Right Level Of Time
There is no way around it. Conducting buyer persona research – the real thing as described above and throughout this series of articles – takes a sufficient amount of time. From an in-house perspective, it becomes an ongoing agenda and specific research efforts often taking a minimum of 3 months to gain the insights needed and to translate into the rich interface of a consumer (user) or buyer persona. These efforts will undergo repeated interactions with consumers or buyers. Now, these repeated interactions even more important given the rapid changes occurring in buyer behaviors due to the introduction of new social technology every 2-3 months.
From a third-party perspective, if you are promised that you can have buyer personas in a week or a short few weeks, then you should be concerned. They are most likely talking about profiles and do not have the connection to the right kind of research established. On occasion, hypothetical or what are called provisional buyer personas can be created. However, the mistake often made is that these are then used as the real thing without having been validated through research. They are, after all, “hypothetical” and if you are being held accountable for a budget to market your company’s solutions – would you bet millions of dollars on “hypothetical”?
To gain the deep insights that anthropological and ethnographic based buyer persona research can offer, companies need to allow for sufficient time in months versus a few short weeks. It takes a minimal level of 15-30 ethnographic research interviews and I’m not referring to counting friends and employees or your sales reps. This means on-site participant-observation methods with actual consumers or buyers. Depending on the complexity of markets, products, and services, it can be even more. The social age is introducing new factors and levels of research that will need to augment traditional ethnographic research. It is important to reiterate that companies today seeking third-party help must look towards a long-term partnership potential for social behavioral research will need much repeated refreshing.
Valuable insights can be gained in 2 to 4 months and depending on the complexity from multiple markets and buyer segments, it may even take longer. However, we are turning a chapter here in the social age. The need for ongoing research, as mentioned, is becoming critical for the shelf-life of consumer (user) and buyer personas is shrinking rapidly in the social age.
Cheap Will Not Get it Done
If buyer persona research tied to anthropological buyer behavior research is done in-house, be sure to get the right level of people to support such efforts. You can be sure that some of today’s leading organizations with in-house practices have staff that includes anthropologists with graduate degrees. These are people well versed in the methods of anthropology and ethnography as well as have the interpretive skills to translate findings into communicable as well as informing consumer (user) or buyer personas. Additionally, commit to a budget that supports ongoing research.
Due to the viral misunderstanding about buyer personas, as I previously mentioned sometimes research is misrepresented as meaning to talk to a few customers, a few friends, and interview employees. This should be a red flag for you if promised by third-parties. You will not get the insights that come from the right level of ethnographic research and the information will most likely be used incorrectly – perhaps even damaging if used for a high stakes initiative.
Budgeting to do the real thing and with the right amount of time is usually somewhere between what typical focus groups costs and a large scale national study for example. Meaning an organization should explore conducting buyer persona research – the real thing backed by skilled ethnographic research – with a budget in mind of five figures – sometimes six figures if it involves many multiple markets and the degree of complexity is high. The real question for many organizations given challenges they may be facing as well as faced with transitioning to a social business – can you afford not to do true ethnographic based buyer persona research to uncover real insights and opportunities that will help shape the direction of your organization in the social age?
Triangulate Your Research
A common misperception is that quantitative and qualitative research has a great divide. In fact, they should enjoy a reciprocal relationship. Ethnographic researches accompanied by the interface of buyer persona archetypes can often times inform quantitative research direction that validate opportunities uncovered. Likewise, quantitative research can be triangulated with qualitative and ethnographic efforts with buyer personas providing the interface and the narrative that brings to life both the quantitative and the qualitative research. Focus groups as well as usability studies can play a role in triangulating research by being used to gauge the reaction to prototypes and new concepts that may be born out of the combined quantitative and ethnographic research.
Involve Multi-Disciplinary Groups
As the viral misunderstanding of the term buyer persona proliferated, a common misperception evolved that buyer personas were provincial to marketing. It is not hard to see why. If the perception is that buyer personas are target buyer profiles for targeting marketing and sales messaging, then it is a logical conclusion for marketing and sales has been targeting buyers for eons. Going back to the origins of personas and buyer personas as an ethnographic research effort to inform design and strategy, these meant involving multi-disciplinary groups from design, branding, corporate strategy, marketing, call centers, fulfillment, and service. With the prominence of the social age now an important development for all businesses, a multi-disciplinary approach becomes even more crucial. The new social buyer ecosystem is touching every facet of an organization and those organizations that have deep rooted knowledge of their consumers or buyers will have a leg up on succeeding in the social age.
A very disconcerting and negative outcome of the viral misunderstanding of the term buyer persona has been how it plays out in the minds of senior marketing executives. Many a VP Marketing I’ve spoken to in the last couple of years see buyer personas only as a tool to help marketing craft sales messaging. Thus, the concepts of buyer personas never make it out of marketing if this thinking exists. Anthropological inspired research and persona development should reside within a hub and spoke part of the organization that truly is focused on the customer and the buyer. Such as in customer experience for example where the efforts must take on a multi-disciplinary approach.
Know When To Use Buyer Persona Research
The questions your organizations are attempting to get answers to can serve as a guide to know when you need the real thing – true ethnographic based buyer persona research. I like to refer to these as the “I have no idea” types of questions that keep executives up at night. If you have no idea about consumers or buyers in a new market and how they may respond to your products or services – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how products or services are used in new and emerging markets – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea what the impact of social media has been on the buying behaviors of potential buyers – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how to generate demand now that buyers have changed their buying behaviors – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea whether approving $15 million in new product development will be received well in the markets targeted – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea what mix of sales and marketing strategy to deploy – then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea why previous buyers are no longer buying - then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea how best to communicate with potential consumers or buyers - then buyer persona research is right for you. If you have no idea why market share dropped by 5% in one year - then buyer persona research is right for you. I think you get the idea!
True anthropological and ethnographic based buyer persona research is meant to get answers to many of the strategic big questions that shape the future direction of organizations. I conclude with saying that the future of buyer personas is social primarily because the social age is presenting executives with many big questions that we’ve yet to have answers for. Returning buyer personas to its origins and original meaning as well as advancing with changes adaptable to the social age will help in answering such big questions.
This is the fourth part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas. In part 1 through part 3 I focused primarily on misconceptions, what needed to change, and why changes must take place in buyer persona development in the social age. In part 4, I would like to center on the role needed in organizations for buyer persona development to adapt to social business.
When looking at the future role of buyer persona development as well as a specific future role within organizations, one must first visit the origins of the term buyer persona. When a term becomes viral, as the term buyer persona did just a few short years ago, it can lose its’ original meaning as well as association with its origin and the professional foundation under which it originated. The term has been used in many variant ways, especially over the past two years. It has been used inaccurately and without full understanding of what exactly the term represents. By talking about the future role, I hope that simultaneously it will help to clarify the unfortunate misunderstanding that exists most prominently in marketing.
The Science of Buyer Persona Research
Buyer persona research has been and will always be about understanding buyer behaviors and perceptions. The actual persona itself, the archetype created, is a representation derived from researching buyer behaviors and is meant to be an interpretative tool. The type of research needed to uncover deep behavioral and cultural percepts are those closely associated with participant-observation methods aligned with anthropology and the ethnographic research techniques commonly utilized by this social science.
The primary purpose for researching buyer behavior is to gain revealing insights into how and why buyers buy. I also will note here that the expression, how and why buyers buy, has also gone viral and has lost its original meaning. Getting at how and why buyers buy is an anthropological inspired behavioral and cultural research effort and not a market or sales research question. It has been misinterpreted to focus solely on the sales questions of buying process, buying stages, decision criteria, and the many other terms used commonly in sales related probing methods. Anthropological methods are extremely important because over 50% of buyer behavior indicators related to how and why buyers buy are determined by social and cultural factors. Conventional market research and sales research or probing methods do not provide insight into these all important determinants. It does not provide the deep understanding that paves the way for shaping better as well as innovative strategies leading to improved profitability and market share.
The distinction is crucial for buyer personas couched in market and sales research methods is a capture of reactive actions. It is devoid of meaning related to goals and context. It will give you a chronological stage view perhaps but will not give you meaningful social contexts that can reshape strategies. For example, you can have two senior IT executives working in different corporations and environments. It is fair to say that if you examine their buying processes and decision criteria’s and other sales related variables, you would wind up with very similar buyer profiles. The social and cultural context however for each may be entirely different and this is where organizations need to gain revealing insight in order to shape strategies for specific markets and groups of buyers.
At this writing, I am very concerned about where the emerging concept of content marketing is heading because as I see it, is caught up in the viral spun around buyer personas incorrectly. Recent qualitative research I’ve conducted show early signs that buyers really do not see anything different. I believe the root of this is related to the fact that while the B2B marketing community may be calling what they do differently – as in content marketing – buyers are still seeing the push messaging that result from conventional market research and sales probing techniques. The term buyer persona is being defined incorrectly as a target profile for content as opposed to an informing process that shapes content strategy.
The New Role of Buyer Behavior Research
As we continue to witness the evolving social age, the need for buyer behavior research becomes more important than ever. Social and cultural contexts are increasingly becoming more prominent in viewing how and why buyers buy. The term Social Customer is becoming more prevalent and there are two major components of this term:
Social Buyer: I’ve used this term frequently in association with buyer personas to identify the Social B2B Buyer as a category in the social age. The obvious focus here is on the purchase decision.
Social Consumer: This term is related to B2C and the focus is on consumerism and consumption.
Specifically to the social buyer, newly formed social interactions and social perceptions are playing a major role in preferences towards products, services, solutions, and relationships. The future role of buyer persona development in organizations will need to focus on identifying the deeper social fabric that are forming and how they play into the overall buyer experience. Social Buyer Personas that are derived from anthropological and ethnographic research can help organizations to identify social and cultural identities as well as be used as a communications platform for aligning their organizations to buyer goals.
The future of buyer personas resides in a new role and framework for organizations. That role is one of a Social Buyer Behaviorist and Anthropologist. A role that uses existing and new social science methods combined with that of developing social buyer personas to create an interface for the research. I recently wrote a series on Social Buyerology that attempted to address such a new role and framework. This role and framework is important also for another crucial reason: if buyer personas are developed and created through the prisms of marketing and sales research orientation, they will tend to be self-referential views of target buyers (an inside-out view) as opposed to a means for discovering not so obvious and hidden meanings that make up social and cultural contexts.
We are witnessing a social revolution today and it is literally changing the face of B2B business. Buyer persona development is not excluded from the impact. Buyer persona development must be coupled with the techniques of the social sciences of social and business anthropology to develop a new role and framework for being of value to strategy within organizations. The term and the practice of buyer persona development must once again be firmly rooted in its origins and original meaning. The future of buyer personas is truly social – it is the interpretive tool organizations will need to make sense of the social anthropological inspired research that reveal deep insights about the evolving social buying behaviors of buyers today.
From a B2B market view, the new social buyer ecosystem continues to undergo a rapid evolution. The pace in 2011 has noticeably quickened. While the social customer ecosystem in the B2C market space is still legions ahead of B2B, it behooves B2B executives to not fall prey to the false sense that the comparative differences means they have to pay little attention. A new social buyer ecosystem is developing with implications on our conventional thinking about how B2B buyers in particular may actually go about researching and buying.
New Buyer Perspectives Evolving
As a primer to talking about the ecosystem, it is important to first visit how buyers are changing against what we think is actually going on. We know from such sources as Basesone’s Buyersphere Report what B2B buyers are doing respective to the use of social media and the Internet as they ultimately make purchase decisions. My focus has been on using qualitative research to understand how buyers are developing social oriented ecosystems and how does this map to conventional thinking in B2B marketing and Sales. There have been some surprising revelations. I would like to break this down for you in several categories and let the actual voice of buyers speak:
Buyer’s Journey: “I’m not sure what that means. I know I don’t go on a so called journey when looking for solutions.”
Buying Stages: “One of the biggest changes for me has been that I no longer think of a step-by-step approach. In fact, I can’t even recall when I last did that. It really is an ongoing almost never ending process of staying on top of the challenges you have and knowing what’s out there."
Content Marketing: “The term, content marketing, I am seeing here and there. Not sure I get it. What I do know is that the sources of information is abundant but can be overwhelming. You have to pick and choose.”
Sales: “Look, I’ve been around a while. Here’s the thing that’s changed. On high ticket items you still need a sales rep to help pull it together but the difference is you expect them to know a heck of lot more than in the past. If they don’t, then it is tough because we can’t spend too much time on bringing them up to speed.”
Social Media/Internet: “The game changer has been that with the Internet and Social Media you can really cull information together about products, solutions, companies, and the likes. Basically it is the first thing we do. As for some of the social networks, like LinkedIn, you can connect with people who can help you out. Without a doubt, I am on the Internet or some social networking site daily.”
The above represents consistent themes heard over several conversations. The qualitative interviews are not as rigorous as I would normally do in a buyer persona research and development effort but nevertheless revealing. This has caused me to reflect more deeply on the changes we are seeing and how a new social buyer ecosystem is forming.
Social Buyer Circles
With Google Plus, circles are suddenly the new rage. In this context they do serve a purpose. Circles are not new. I’m influenced by David Armano who came up with the concept of influence ripples or circles to depict blogger spheres of influence as far back as 2006.
Most recently, Michael Brito offered a great perspective via the use of circles on why content still matters and how the social customer is filtering relevant content.
Here is my view of Social Buyer Circles within a Social Buyer Ecosystem:
Implications for Engaging the Social Buyer
Always On: the Social Buyer is living and breathing the “always on” life via social media, social networks, and the Internet. The implications are that the Social Buyer – from a B2B prism – is active on the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook daily. This includes blurring the lines between personal and business.
Non-Linear Thinking: the Social Buyer appears to not be thinking conventionally with respect to a methodical stage-by-stage buying process or buying stages. Rather, challenges and solutions awareness as well as evaluation are in a constant state of motion and monitoring. This has implications to how we think in the future about sales and content marketing.
Pull Affect on Challenges: the Social Buyer is exhibiting behavior of setting up what I would like to refer to as “Challenge Circles”. Social Buyers have challenges they are constantly addressing and pull various elements of social networks and social information sources into these challenge circles. The implication for B2B marketers and sellers is how to get pulled into one of the social buyer’s challenge circles. From a sales standpoint, I like Tibor Shanto's perspective via his co-authored book with Craig Elias entitled Shift!:Harness the Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers and his focus on trigger events. The relevancy here is understanding what triggers one of the challenge circles to activate into motion towards a solution.
Information Sources Go Social: the Social Buyer is beginning to migrate from a purely search behavior to that of social media stored recall. What this means is that social buyers are using social information sources to recall when a “challenge circle” needs to be addressed with a solution. Storing recall through YouTube, Product Review Sites, Q&A such as Focus and Quora, and blogs they subscribe to.
Internal Collaboration Rules: the Social Buyer is engaging and collaborating through internal and private social networks. New platforms such as Jive are influencing the way organizations work and migrate towards being a social business. IBM is way out in front on this. This is making stakeholder buy-in and validation happen more rapidly. It is also establishing precedents for more open sharing of solutions which impacts how budgets are created for expenditures and allocating resources.
Validation Goes Social: the Social Buyer has rapid ability to validate solutions and potential purchase decisions socially through peer networks, social networks, internal networks, review sites, analysts, almost instant feedback on forums, online assessments, and the likes. The implication for B2B companies is that their online presence must extend beyond just their web site and few social networking accounts – it must be extended by influence sources. This is also radically changing the concept of public relations in the social age.
Become a Circle of Influence: the Social Buyer, as I have previously written about, is also interested in their professional growth and becoming a circle of influence themselves. Through blogging, tweeting, discussion groups, and etc. social buyers are actively seeking to be a “sphere of influence” as David Armano describes. This is new phenomenon in B2B market spaces whereby engaging with a recognized social influencer takes on new meaning.
Connected Influence: the Social Buyer is more connected, interpersonally as well as socially, than we could ever have imagined. We are finding that many interact with connections through social networks and other forms such as email or telephone. With many never having met their peer in person or arranging to meet peers at conference. The impact of peer influence on the social buyer is immense. The implication is obvious for B2B marketers and sellers – how do you make peer influencers brand advocates?
Surrounding the social buyer circles are interaction points with the top representing the buyer’s perspective and the bottom representing what the seller must provision. I offered a more detailed view of this when describing the importance of organizations to focus on buyer experience interactions.
While circles may be the rage, it is for good reason. They clearly are helping in gaining social intelligence about the social buyer. The driving forces of being always-on, instant accessibility to sources, overwhelming information overload, social networking management, and increase forces of internal collaboration are influencing buyers to have these circular adaptations. Changing forever conventional perceptions of how buyers in the social age work, collaborate, meet challenges, find solutions, engage with sellers, and ultimately make purchases.
This is the third part of a series of reflective articles on the future of buyer personas. In part 1 of this reflection on the future of buyer personas, I focused on some of the misconceptions about buyer personas and in part 2, I offered perspectives on why changes were needed to be relevant to the social age. In part 3, we turn to the topic of what types of changes are needed.
As I alluded to in part 1, somehow buyer personas went wayward in being correctly defined. Where did it go wayward? Primarily, like most definitions in business, the term was adopted as well as co-opted to put a new label on practices that have been around for a few decades in marketing and sales. Many a good sales professionals as well as marketing professionals I knew back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s adopted the valued practices of understanding the buying process, profiling their customers/buyers, discovering buyer constraints, understanding the buyer’s decision criteria, and adopting KSF (Key success Factors) factoring in marketing and sales planning. Consultative and solutions selling programs were developed to incorporate sales techniques designed to enable sales in particular to learn how to ask relevant questions aimed at uncovering answers to the above. Buyer personas over the last five years in particular have been layered over these existing practices – as if we were putting a new cover on an old book. My hope in part 3 is that by noting what needs to change, it will also dispel the new cover on an old book misunderstanding. At the same time, offer perspectives on the future of buyer personas in the social age.
From Art to Science
Buyer persona development is more science than art. Now in the social age, the science of buyer personas must be emphasized even more so than ever. Why is this? Buyer persona – and now Social Buyer Persona Development is about understanding behaviors, ecosystems, culture, and goals. Goals have been at the heart of personas in general since their origins. It takes science to uncover changes in behaviors and to understand goals in ways that customers and buyers have difficulty articulating. The science of goal interpretation from the unarticulated reveals the deepest insights about buyer behaviors as well as taps into underlying resources leading to innovation. The science of goal orientation leads to discovering the often hidden and unarticulated roots of “why” people buy. The social sciences of ethnography and anthropology are becoming more prominent in the business world and are essential foundations for true social buyer persona development. Recently, I offered a perspective on a new field called Social Buyerology to foster this sharpened focus. This change is needed because we are in a period of history that is undergoing the most significant change in buyer behaviors since the end of the Second World War. Creating a new cover for existing practices is art. Rewriting the story inside is science.
From Push to Pull
I’m a big fan of John Hagel, author of the book The Power of Pull. His macro views on how business models are shifting from push to pull is important to buyer personas because they change the context by which buyer personas are researched and created. Traditional management and business models have been built on pushing outward through the organization to buyers and inducing them to buy. John Hagel’s makes a 21st Century argument that organizations must develop a spirit of collaboration between co-workers and customers (buyers) that pulls them towards improving both worlds via the organizations. No easy task for much of today’s management structure still is focus on pushing products and services out to customers. The social age however is radically allowing this concept to happen. Understanding how the social buyer persona behaves in a pull economic model is integral to organizations learning how to collaborate with their buyers versus engaging in the art of persuasive seduction.
From Messaging to Listening
Related to from push to pull, much of the intended efforts in building buyer personas – whether executed correctly or not – has been about how to message to buyers. The messaging of course aimed at persuasion in a marketing and sales context. Social buyers today are responding to social organizations that are becoming more adept at listening. The future of buyer personas in the social age is to adapt to the science of listening and identifying the constantly shifting patterns of changes in buyer behaviors. Let the words of a buyer captured in a qualitative interview speak to this: “Look, I get all kinds of stuff from (company name removed – sorry!) and its all the same – they are just pushing (product name removed – sorry!) on me. They can disguise it all they want with white papers and all but it still comes down to pushing a product on me. That’s not listening in my book.” Social buyer persona development must change to be more about informing on listening competency than messaging competency.
From Profiling to Narrative
Not to beat a dead horse, but buyer personas must continue to move from a misunderstood practice of profiling to a practice of understanding the narrative of the social buyer. The narrative is part science and part art. You cannot tell the narrative of the social buyer artfully without the prerequisite of the uncovering attained by science. Narratives have long been an interpretative component of the social sciences as a way of presenting as well as recasting research findings. Narratives and scenario design have been building blocks of personas since their origins and can play an essential role in helping to understanding the changing buyer behaviors brought on by the advent of the social age.
From Marketing/Sales Push to Social Experience Design
Another person I’m a big fan of is Paul Greenberg (plus he’s a big Yankees fan like me), a leading expert on Social CRM and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. Paul’s mantra of - “Buyers don’t want to be an object of a sale but rather the subject of an experience.” – says it best for me. For B2B organizations, this is a tough transition for buried deep into the DNA of their own corporate cultures is the emphasis on pushing outwardly product and sales messaging thus they have little guidance on how to turn B2B buying into a social experience. Both user and buyer persona development is a design thinking process. When implemented correctly, buyer personas have been used to inform the design of buyer strategies and interactions. In the social age, social buyer persona development plays an important role in informing organizations on how to design social buying experiences that’s predicated on listening and engagement as opposed to messaging and push.
From Content Presentation to Social Interaction
The idea of using content to create CTA’s (Call-to-Action) is not necessarily a new idea. It has been part of marketing efforts for years. The term “content marketing” is gaining a foothold due to the explosion of new media channels resulting from the Internet and the Social Age. Among the positive aspects afforded to organizations, there have been consequences. Let’s have the voice of a buyer articulate: “It’s like a fire hose at times. There is so much information coming my way that it is getting hard to manage and stay on top of. I wish there was a way to turn the faucet handle down.” To me this is content presentation just flooding media channels. Social buyer persona development can help inform not only the design of content but also how to design for embedding interaction into content strategy. Buyer persona development must change from a contextual intent of content presentation and messaging to providing deep insight into the design of social interaction behaviors buyers seek. Content marketing in the form of content presentation exacerbates information overload. Embedding social interaction into content is like a sorting belt to buyers. As content floods them along the electronic media conveyor belt, those with social interaction embedded get automatically sorted to a more streamline conveyor belt.
As we look to the future of buyer personas, it is becoming more and more evident to me that the next evolution is in adapting to the social age. It is apt to note that the social sciences of ethnography and anthropology must become more foundational to buyer personas due to the order of magnitude shift we are seeing in social behaviors, interactions, and goals related to the social age.
There is irony in the narrative of my reflection. Personas, both user and buyer, started out with an emphasis on ethnographic research before the term buyer personas was co-opted to describe marketing and sales buyer profiling. The social age is returning buyer personas to the realm of a practice that more closely aligns with the social sciences as well as with the conceptual origins of personas in general.
In part 1 of this reflection on the future of buyer personas, I focused on how it is important to leave some of the major misconceptions about buyer personas behind in order to peer into the future. In part 2, I would like to offer perspectives on why the practice and process of buyer personas, as we’ve known them for the past decade, must undergo significant change to be relevant in the social age.
Without a doubt, we are seeing the most dramatic change in buyer behaviors since post World War II. In my opinion, the seller to buyer world has literally been flipped upside down in unimaginable ways brought on first by the advent of the Internet and now by emerging social trends. In a recent article, The Influence of the Social Buyer on Business, I alluded to areas that are undergoing transformation as well as new relational aspects emerging. These being areas related to new social buyer ecosystems, social business models, and new social buying cycles. The areas mentioned are also having a transformational affect on the practice of buyer persona research and creation. Let us look at several factors that give insight into why changes are needed:
Frame of Reference Must Change
Our reference point for decades has been sellers in the mode of finding – or shall we say hunting – buyers. Organizations implemented simple to complex strategies designed to find buyers and persuade them to hear what they have to say about their products, services, and solutions being offered. Much of marketing and sales still operates the same way today from this frame of reference. Training programs still continue to be focused on finding, probing, presenting, and the likes all aimed at persuading a buyer to hear what a company has to say. Simply stated, the defined role of marketing and sales for the past century has been to be the deliverer of information and to persuade. In today’s social age, this is no longer true. Marketers and sellers can expect social buyers to know if not more than they do, then plenty about products, services, and solutions well before they even get the chance to engage. This is of importance to the process of buyer persona research and development because it means organizations must be in a social listening mode to take in the insights about social buyers. The insights gained may not match up well with an outbound or inside-out frame of reference. The frame of reference succinctly must go from how to get buyers to hear to how to listen to buyers.
The Connected Buyer
Social buyers today are highly connected to peers, influencers, informational sources, suppliers, and academia. Creating new forms of social buyer ecosystems that are also malleable – meaning they are likely to undergo ongoing movement and changes constantly. This has profound implications for buyer persona research. We can no longer have a concrete buyer-centric view whereby we look at the singular buyer. Social buyer persona research will need to adapt to a discrete social buyer ecosystem perspective to truly understand how social buyers are connected and creating new social ecosystems literally on the fly.
No Longer a Snapshot – More Like a Movie
Prior to as well as since personas were originated, the aim was to capture a static snapshot of the user or buyer at a particular point in time. As buyer personas evolved, a prevailing notion was that buyer personas came with a “best if used by” date. At first, it was recommended that new buyer personas be created every 5 years. This timeline continued to shorten. I say it is just about gone altogether now. Let’s face it – a lot happens - even in six months. Buyer persona development will need to adapt to helping organizations have an ongoing dynamic view of social buyers as opposed to a static snapshot of a buyer. This is creating implications on how social buyer personas are researched as well as developed and will call for new methodologies.
Time to Jettison the Sales Funnel and Buying Stage Views – Might as Well Throw Out the Buyer Journey Too
There has much debate as well as thoughtful new ideas about the sales funnel or the sales pipeline view marketing and sales has been wedded to what seems like forever. If you have been around in marketing or sales even just a few years, you know that what you learned in college still looks the same. The buyer has stages leading to a purchase decision. Wherever you are now, these stages have been altered slightly, given new names, or diagrammed differently. But, the view is still the same – like gospel - by golly there are four, five, or six stages that buyers religiously go through. There has also been much discussion about the buyer’s journey – including from me – on how we have to map to the buyer’s journey as they go through these buying stages and how we track via the sales funnel. My view has changed on this the more I see qualitatively how a new social buyer is emerging. Closely associated with the view of the connected social buyer, I am seeing the social buyer self-creating socially oriented cycles and circles that are meaningful to them in their pursuit to achieve goals. I will offer more insight soon in a separate article on the emergence of Social Buyer Circles. This is an important development that will alter significantly social buyer persona research and development.
The above represents just few of several reasons why the future of buyer persona research and development is social. The social age is causing many businesses to rethink and reinvent themselves in the wake of the emerging social buyer. Buyer persona research and development is no exception.
Next: The Future of Buyer Personas is Social – Part 3
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