Anyone who follows this blog knows how passionate I am about persona marketing. For me and countless others, buyer personas have stopped the madness of checklist marketing.

But as I say in the opening “confessions“ chapter of my new ebook, The Buyer Persona Manifesto, I’ve learned a lot about the difficulty of the execution step:

“Steering the proverbial supertanker is a snap compared to introducing any new idea in a major corporation. With a ship, at least you know that if you crank the helm hard, it will eventually come round.”

While the concept of buyer personas is relatively clear, an array of missing skills and details are leading companies to take shortcuts that compromise the entire idea. Many are packaging up their internal knowledge of their customers, or segmenting buyers based on role, and calling the output a buyer persona.

These companies have failed to consider that the information that is obvious to them is also obvious to their competitors. They have barely scratched the surface of the principles of persona marketing, and are often reaffirming mistaken ideas through social media.

These concerns inspired me to write The Buyer Persona Manifesto and to develop a new online workshop, Persona Marketing Essentials. My goal — to ensure that marketers and their colleagues can quickly grasp the most “essential” parts of persona marketing, see what’s missing about their buyer knowledge and assess the potential for their own work.

The ebook is published for free, without registration and under a Creative Commons license. I’d be grateful if you would pass it along to colleagues who might benefit.

For people who want to know more than I could fit into the ebook, I’m delivering the Persona Marketing Essentials seminar online on a regular basis. I hope to “see you” there.