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What is more important: the product or the customer?

Some would say you can easily win a piece of the market with a disruptive product or service. Others would say even the fanciest thing can go unclaimed, as you may miss the target audience's needs or somehow spoil their experience.

Product-Centricity vs. Customer-Centricity

When I talk about a product-centric approach, I mean when companies develop products and services with the idea that a good hunter is more likely than average to get a lucky hit. They also believe that sometimes people don't know what they really want until they see it. And they believe in the power of persuasion.

But there's another approach where everything revolves around customers. The product or service is designed according to their needs, goals, frustrations, problems...

On the one hand, that takes effort and time. Customer research is a big deal. On the other hand, you get authentic loyalty instead of dependence, and you win in the long run.

It's impossible to say with certainty which approach is better. Microsoft is doing well despite its product-centric focus, whereas IBM, which relies on customer experience (CX), is not far behind.

And yet, 70% of B2B customers end their journey before the sales stage. So if you don't want to part with potential customers prematurely and you're ready to win their hearts and minds, the customer-centric approach is the way to go.

Placing Customers at the Heart of Business

Becoming a customer-centric organization is not easy. First, you have to know and understand the people you're selling to. Defining personas for your business can help you do that.

Personas are collective images of your customers backed up by research. They let you hide any number of people behind a fictitious person. You can have one, two, or even more personas if your audience is varied. And you can target as many personas as you consider reasonable.

Why Personas?

In addition to giving you an opportunity to walk a mile in your customers' shoes, personas have several benefits:

  • Segmentation: You turn a huge audience into a few persona profiles that are realistic, relatable to everyone, and easily managed.
  • Visualization: Instead of reading many pages of customer research data, you can look at a concise profile containing all the necessary information to share with stakeholders.
  • Potential: You can always go further and build a customer journey map to find flaws and opportunities in you CX.

Building a Persona in Five Steps

Building a persona is an intricate process that requires some time, yet it pays off with a lot of insights. Here are five steps to take.

Step 1: Do research

The most important element of building personas is conducting high-quality research.

Take the time to collect data, conduct customer interviews, communicate with customer-facing staff, run surveys (e.g., customer satisfaction surveys) and polls, and study customer feedback. The more complete data you have on hand, the higher your chances of success.

Step 2: Identify patterns

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Switching From Product-Centricity to Customer-Centricity With Personas

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Katerina Kondrenko

Katerina Kondrenko is an experienced content creator with a passion for research, French bulldogs, and British cats. She has an economics degree, but she prefers letters to numbers.

LinkedIn: Katerina Kondrenko