Fifteen: Introducing Personas
The term "persona" is borrowed from theater, in which it describes the personality traits of a character that an actor is meant to depict so that they might more accurately represent the playwright's intent. In marketing, a persona is a detailed profile of a market segment, intended to enable the marketer to more effectively interact with customer segments.
The use of personas is not entirely new, but the traditional personas are "thin porridge" comprised of a few demographic details, and not enough to bring the character to life. They boldly proclaim that "nobody currently uses personas the way we do."
That is, you cannot envision the behavior of a customer based on a few basic facts: what a "30-year-old Caucasian female, mother of two" might do is highly speculative. Far more detail is required to understand the needs she is trying to serve, the way she goes about gathering information and making purchase decisions, is necessary to be able to predict what marketing message will resound with her.
Topology
Topology is not part of the persona, but an important prerequisite: it is about the competitive landscape. Every firm competes with others for customers, and many "own" specific terrain.
It is especially important to understand that you are competing to serve the needs of customers, not on the basis of products. That is to say that if you have developed an entirely new product, such as a bracelet that relieves lower back pain, you are not competing only against other bracelets, but against the variety of pills, creams, applications, gadgets, and other products that relieves lower back pain.
This is a particular blind-spot for firms that provide innovative solutions: human needs do not change and are very well known, and even though your product may be the first of its kind, it is competing with a myriad of other products that already exist to serve the same need.
The way in which your offering is perceived as different to others, for better or for worse, indicates your position on the competitive landscape today. The degree to which you can change perceptions of your product can move you to a different and better position in future.
Psychographics
Psychographics refers to personality traits and tendencies of an individual, generally deriving from theoretical psychological models. When we speak of a person being a "type a" or "type b" personality, or a "left-brained" or "right-brained" thinker, we are borrowing from psychological theories that are meant to describe human behavior.
It is not limited to simplistic models of personality, but also speaks to tendencies and motivations. Whether a person "always buys the cheapest option" or "will pay a little extra for better quality" is useful for a marketer to consider.
In terms of predictive ability, psychographics beats demographics hands-down, but is still trumped by behavior. A person who buys ten gallons of gas every Tuesday will likely buy ten gallons of gas next Tuesday as well, regardless of their personality type.
Psychographics will also help to identify traits and behaviors that are more clearly causally related to purchasing behavior. For example, a television shipping channel once assumed that its best customers were working-class women age 55 and older, but then noticed that over 20% of their best customers were under affluent individuals under age thirty. The similarity that the demographic analysis missed is that both groups are heavy television watchers. As such, age and income became less influential in their modeling.
Demographics
While the authors have downplayed demographics, they do not dismiss them entirely, as there are certain characteristics that have logical connections to specific needs. In general, men don't purchase lipstick, people in their twenties are not looking for retirement homes, and you can't sell many engine block heaters in Florida. There are exceptions, and instances where someone is purchasing something for a different person to use, but they are few.
Demographics are also of value in helping to create personas that seem like real people - behavioral and psychographic details are abstract, and it is hard to envision a "type-a personality who budgets once a month" but a "Hispanic female aged 35" is easy to imagine, and giving her "two kids and a minivan" makes here seem all the more real.
Leveraging Personas
The authors leverage personas in much the same way as designers write testing scripts - considering what the persona would want, desire, need, and do at each step of the buying process, and determining how such a person would likely want to interact with a business to solve a given need.
(EN: And here is where personas tend to falter - they are entirely imaginary and reflect what the marketer assumes that such a person would think, feel, and do, which may be out of joint with their actual behavior and motivations. Let a fifty-year-old Caucasian male, married with three children and a six-figure income, speculate about what a twenty-two year old single Asian female who earns minimum wage might be thinking, and he will get it dreadfully wrong - and the same is true the other way around.)
Empathy: Rewriting the Golden Rule
The golden rule of "do unto others as you would have them do unto" is based on the assumption that other people want the exact same things as we would. It has, unfortunately, been the implicit philosophy of many decisions in which someone feels that they know, without asking, what someone else might want. Customers are satisfied by being treated the way they would like to be treated, and the only way to know their expectations is to ask.
(EN: This notion comes in and out of fashion, as there is some validity to the claim that some people don't know what they want and expect someone more familiar with the product to make decisions for them, and even if you give people what they ask for they will still not be happy. In all I don't think there is any simple truism that will hold across all products and all customers, but in general the better approach is to investigate the need they are trying to solve.)
The "Emotional Future"
The authors take a dim view of the notion, promoted by advertising agencies, that the future of marketing is in making emotional connections to the consumer, and which dismisses "rational reasoned information" in favor of emotion and gut-feeling. It's telling that one of the foremost champions of emotion in advertising has produced dismal failures for his customers.
A specific example is a $200 million campaign for Nissan (the ad where Barbie ditches Ken and drives off with GI Joe in a red convertible) that was very clever, but sales actually decreased afterward. Not may people are willing to base a $35,000 decision on a clever commercial.
And there's plenty more where that came from: Mr. Six of Six Flags , Joe Isuzu, the pets.com sock puppet, MasterCard's "priceless" campaign, the Quiznos use of Spongemonkeys, the animated California Raisins, and the Taco Bell Chihuahua were all popular and memorable commercials which did no good at all for their brands. (The California Raisins actually did sell a lot of licensed merchandise, but not actual raisins.)
The authors refer to these ads as examples of "irrelevant engagement," very good at making people aware of brands but giving them no compelling reason to make a purchase. It's also speculated that when people see advertising that is all style and no substance, it creates a negative perception about the quality of the brand - customers recognize that a clever gimmick is often a smokescreen, which arouses suspicion and doubt.
There is currently a lot of irrelevant engagement on the Web, as companies are attempting to get attention in social media and rewarding people for sharing or forwarding their commercial messages to friends, regardless of whether friends are the type to be interested in the brand.
The authors concede that this is a great way to get a lot of attention, but not necessarily the kind that matter. And while there is the school that preaches the value of building a huge audience and figuring out how to leverage it for profit later, no-one has yet made that transition effectively. Engagement alone is not enough. It has to engage the right people, at the right time, with the right message.
One of the authors, who taught marketing in college, recounts an incident when a student was deliriously happy one morning, wearing a diamond ring. She was excited because she and her boyfriend had just gotten engaged. When he asked her when the wedding was planned, she couldn't answer. "There's not going to be any wedding. We're just engaged."
The Role of Emotion
The authors do not entirely dismiss the importance of emotions, nor deny that they occur before rational thought is applied. Specifically, we recognize needs and goals based on emotion, but switch to reason when we make buying decisions.
That is to say the need for food is based on the fear of hunger, and the desire to get an education is based on hope for a better future. The emotional reaction to a situation, real or imagined, is what causes people to recognize a need and be motivated to take action. But deciding what action to take, and what resources are necessary to support that action, is a very rational process.
There is still some emotional portent in decision making - hope that a solution might work or fear that I might not - but these largely come down to providing emotional affirmation of an essentially logical decision.
It's asserted that "Studies have demonstrated that when a person can't connect emotionally with whatever task he is undertaking, he will not be able to make a decision" (EN: The link the author provides to the study is defunct, and I'm not able to find it otherwise, but it does seem a reasonable assertion.)
Benefits versus Features
Companies, proud of their products, are fond of bragging about their features. Customers, meanwhile, are interested in the benefits they will receive from purchasing the products. The two are meant to align, but they very often diverge. Specifically, features pertain to things and benefits pertain to people - and while the feature implies the benefit it delivers, it is often not self-evident.
The company that advertises a feature and assumes or expects the customer to figure out how it benefits them will often find itself mistaken. It is therefore important to spell out the benefits to the customer rather than hoping they will recognize them. To be blunt, customers are less fascinated with your products than you are, and will often not invest the time to figure it out.
(EN: It's my sense that the author is being generous here. In my experience helping firms to sell products, it was on many occasions painfully evident that the company failed to consider whether a feature was of any use at all - an engineer came up with a cool idea for a product feature, an executive signed off on it, and it was only after a product was mass-produced that anyone [often myself] asked them to consider why the customer should want it.)
In this sense, the use of personas should be taken further than just the marketing department - to design a product by identifying the needs of the customer, and a line of products that serves the different needs of different products. It should not be in the marketing department alone that someone attempts to figure out why customers should want a given product feature.
The Big Picture
In the era of mass-marketing, there was a lot of big-picture thinking that missed, or pointedly ignored, the fine details. Products were designed and marketed to serve the broadest range of customers possible, to be jack of all trades and master of none. In the present age, customers are rejecting these products in favor of simpler ones that serve their needs.
The authors bristle at the suggestion that "new age marketing" is chaotic and lacks a formula. It is not uniform, because customers are not uniform - and in fact, to have a single over-arching approach to marketing is a sign a company has failed to consider the needs of customers as individuals.
In other words, if present practices in marketing seem fragmented and disintegrated, it is because the market is so. What is relevant to one is not relevant to the next, and success belongs to the provider who recognizes that and acts accordingly.