Recent buzz about personas has created some confusion. If you've tried to develop and deploy personas, you may have experienced resistance from other departments because they don't grasp the value that personas purportedly provide. The reason may be that personas (in the form of customer profiles) by themselves don't offer all that much.
But personas are not just customer profiles; rather, "personas" is the title for a complex tool that has four components:
- Persona descriptions
- Scenarios
- Insights
- Innovation opportunity handoff
Only if you complete all four parts will your Personas offer their true value: the ability to translate customer research into valuable innovation and action.
Part 1: Persona Descriptions
Because we marketers often find information about customers to be interesting in its own right, we can mistakenly assume that people in other departments will see value in customer data, too. This assumption is dangerous because it might let us stop at the first layer of persona development.
Persona descriptions are receptacles that capture and communicate what market research knows about our customers. A persona description is a customer profile of a typical customer's attributes, which illustrate the segment the persona represents. The persona description contains demographic information, behavioral and attitudinal information, and information about customers' needs and goals that relate to the interest area your company addresses.
As such, persona descriptions are good vehicles for communicating your relevant customer data in terms that are easy to understand and remember. But they do not alone provide enough direction for product managers, developers, and sales people to get them excited.
Part 2: Scenarios
A scenario describes a typical customer (your persona) engaged in the typical tasks* and activities that allow him to achieve a specific goal. Like persona descriptions, scenarios are based in research, both quantitative and qualitative, and are relevant to the products and services your company provides. Scenarios may show how customers currently interact with your company's specific products or services, or may be more "product or process neutral."
A good scenario—and this is where your understanding of your internal audience's capabilities and culture comes in to play—is written specifically for the team that will use it. A product management team needs a user persona using the product in question. A marketing collateral team needs a buyer persona engaged in a buying process, with emphasis on the reasons why and channels from which he is gathering information. A sales team needs an economic buyer persona and a technological buyer persona engaged in conversations that result in a decision to purchase.
This first round of scenarios should communicate what you know from ethnographic research about what customers currently do to achieve their goals, and this information is the first step toward making your personas actually useful to other teams.
