Twenty-Two: Bringing Personas to Life
The problem with communicating to "the market" is that it is an abstract concept and its' difficult for you to understand their interests - and as a result, your message are diffused and generic, and speak to no-one.
John Steinbeck once counseled a young writer to tell stories as if he were telling it to one person, preferably a specific person he knew. The same advice is given to public speakers, to single out a member of the audience and speak as if it were a one-on-one conversation. Doing so makes your communication more direct, personal, and genuine.
Marketers would do well to follow the same advice when preparing messages to the market - and this is the value of a persona. It puts a face to the crowd, gives you someone to focus on. If you are unable to focus on the person, you end up focusing on the product and speaking in abstract terms that are meaningful to no-one.
This is one of the reasons personal selling is more effective than mass marketing: a salesman speaks to one person, and speaks to their individual needs and interests, whereas mass marketing speaks to the masses and hopes that people are interested in what they want to say.
In the present-day world, the human touch is very much missing. People are inured to, and unimpressed by, canned sales pitches that treat them like an anonymous member of a mob. But speak to them as an individual, and they will be engaged by the conversation.
Empathy
The secret to effective marketing is to identify with the interests of the prospect. Rather than talking about the features you think are exceptional, and about which they could not care less, speak to the way in which the product serves their needs. Using personas which provide a human face better enables marketers to consider the emotions of market segments.
(EN: The authors attempt to distinguish empathy from sympathy, but totally mangle the definitions of both, and seem a bit silly in the process. You cannot truly empathize - experience the same feelings - as the customer. You can only sympathize - attempt to understand their emotions and act in an accommodating manner. The point is that you should make a genuine effort to gain understanding rather than acting in a disingenuous and superficial manner that patronizes. This is not the difference between sympathy and empathy, but the difference between sympathy and false sympathy, or between caring and acting like you care.)
There's a reminder that "we won't achieve our goals until our customers achieve theirs" - and there is little chance that a person seeking a product will attempt to accommodate the emotions of one vendor who might provide a solution - it's incumbent on the vendor to serve the customer.
A Framework for Character Development
A Framework for Character Development
Early on, we approached persona development as an intuitive process. But as it became clear that we were evolving a reproducible process, we systematized our intuitive processes, continued our research, and codified our results.
As part of this process, we wanted to find a systematic way to create personas that were rich, deep, believable, and not stereotypical. We looked to other groups that face the same problem and found a perfect match in fiction writers--we turned to the crafts of literature and film for insight into character development. Fortunately, we were introduced to the preeminent Hollywood screenwriting teacher, David Freeman.
Character Diamonds
The "character diamond" is borrowed from acting.. In consists of three to five traits (generally four, hence "diamond") that an actor can consider in depicting a character, in considering the behavior they will demonstrate. IF an actor is told that a character is "surly, nervous, energetic, and results-oriented" he will deliver the lines in a different way as he would if he considered the character to be "pleasant, comfortable, lazy, and disinterested."
It's also necessary to provide qualities of character that are descriptive of behavior. If told that a villain is "evil," actors will fall to stereotypes. If told the villain is "arrogant, self-centered, cold, and impulsive" they can depict a rich and textured character.
Using qualities from the character diamond can likewise add a layer of realism to personas.
Masks
Masks are very similar, but in this instance it is one or more characteristics that the person is attempting to fake in order to create an impression on others, and may even be fooling themselves. It is often contradictory to one of the characteristics of the character diamond.
For example, a character who is "vulgar, unintelligent, vain, and clumsy" might want others to think of him as being "sophisticated and charming" - and there is a distinct difference in behavior between a person who genuinely has those traits and another who is trying to fake them.
Considering masks is also important in understanding human behavior, because people will often utilize masks in real life to make an impression on others. Sometimes, speaking to the person behind the mask is more productive, but in other cases helping them to maintain their mask is the better choice.
For example, consider "players" - suburban white kids who adopt the style of urban black kids (EN: there's a less flattering name, but I don't expect the author's keen on using it). Their taste in clothing, music, video games, cars, jewelry, and other trappings is not correlated to their demographic or behavior profile, but to that of the mask they are attempting to adopt.
Bikers are another example: rather boring, unimportant middle-aged white men gravitate toward the image of youth and rebellion in joining motorcycle clubs. They still want comfortable seats and lumbar supports on their motorcycles, but a striking visual and auditory impact.
Dealing with Consensus
Selling to a single customer, who has the authority to make a decision and take action, requires speaking to one set of motivating factors. When dealing with groups of people, there will be multiple factors that may be contradictory to one another.
The obvious example is a married couple planning a vacation - each of them has a different idea of what they would like to do, and you must satisfy both of them to sell a package.
Particularly for products or market segments when multiple people will be involved in a decision, the author suggests amalgamating them into a single persona that represents the concerns of all parties who have the ability to influence the decision.
This is particularly difficult when selling to businesses with formal and labyrinthine approval processes: the employees who will use the product, the manager who will recommend the purchase, the procurement department who will consider the cost, the legal department who will consider the contract terms, etc.
There can be no shortcuts to this situation: all parties must be satisfied for the deal to go through, and speaking in different terms to different people may cause you to lose credibility when they compare notes.
The One We Want to go Away
It's been mentioned that not all customers are good customers, and you may decide that there are "anti-personas" that represent shoppers who will waste your time and money and then not buy, or customers who frequently return products or require so much service after the sale that they cause you to lose profit.
The author shares electronics retailer Best Buy's notion of having "angels" and "devils." The angels are customers who buy the most profitable items without waiting for markdowns and rebates, buy the extended warranty the retailer offers, and never troubles them for support after the sale.
The devils are customers who wait for sales and load up on "loss leaders" without buying anything else, then flip the goods on eBay. They apply for rebates and then return items to the store. They come into the store with rock-bottom price quotes and demand the retailer make good on its lowest price pledge. They will return an item after opening the package and then buy it back again at the open-box discount. In effect, they find every legal means to extract profit from the firm.
By identifying bad customers, the firm can be discreet in its marketing - excluding the devils from promotional mailings, charging a 15% restocking fee for returned merchandise, reselling returned merchandise on the Internet rather than in the same store it was returned, etc.
Who Should Create the Personas?
The authors previously suggested involving "everyone who has direct contact with your customers" in the process of defining personas.
Beyond that, they suggest looking for "humanistic" people with strong intuition and feeling preferences in their MBTI, as these factors are associated with people who are sensitive to the nuances of relationships and emotional needs and tend to take a big-picture view.
The Art of Storytelling
Creating personas is likened to storytelling - imagining characters and considering their behavior and interactions in scenarios in the context of a sensible plot. In essence, the persona is the protagonist in your story and that "it's the job of a persuasion architect to role-play every persona's experience.
(EN: And herein lies the tragedy of personas ... it's make-believe, the total fabrication of an insider imagining what a customer might do based on stereotypes. Granted, that's likely what most firms do in a less informed way when they imagine the desires of a generic customer, but still inferior to doing actual research - don't play make-believe to discover how a 40-year-old female mother of two would shop for a blender, but interview some people who actually are members of that demographic. Interviews are often dismissed because they ask people to speculate about their own behavior - but this is far more sensible than asking insiders to speculate about other peoples' behavior.)
Creating the Narrative
The buying process, from the moment that a need is recognized to the moment it is fulfilled, is a sequence of events that follow much like a narrative. Your persona thinks of ways to satisfy their needs, making progress toward their goal, and making mistakes along the way.
The authors suggest that a well-created persona should "leap off the page" and feel like a real person. Writing their story should be easy because all the information you need, and that will guide their decisions along the way, is provided in the persona itself. Where you find yourself struggling to tell the tale, it's a sign the persona needs more development.