DM Magazine, a leading authority focused on data-driven marketing, recently featured an exclusive interview with BPI President, Jim Kraus. Known for their in-depth coverage of emerging trends and actionable expertise, DM Magazine captured Jim’s unique perspectives on buyer personas. Below is a snippet from this insightful conversation.
Buyer Personas: An Interview with Jim Kraus, President, Buyer Persona Institute
You may have seen them displayed on large wall posters in your building hallways and common areas. Maybe you were given laminated one-page summaries of them. Or possibly been handed a richly illustrated reference booklet prior to a brainstorming session. Quite likely you were asked to attend a kick-off event or been taken through an overview slide presentation. Perhaps you were directed to an internal web site dedicated to explaining them. Or given promotional trinkets like coffee mugs, mouse pads and key chains, even trading cards, in a company-wide effort to heighten awareness of them.
Whatever form they take, buyer personas have been widely embraced by all kinds of businesses to help foster customer first thinking. They are a way to gain insight into the needs and motivations of customers – their goals and aspirations – their beliefs and values. To understand what bothers them – what pleases them. To know, in brief, who they are, and what makes them different. That insight, or so the theory goes, should breed empathy for customers, ultimately leading to better products, more intuitive interfaces, more persuasive messaging.
In theory. But only if they yield meaningful insight. And therein lies the challenge. Because if they are too superficial or too general or too vague, they stand little chance of being widely adopted.
The concept of a buyer persona was first introduced and popularized in a book called “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” back in 1998 by the software pioneer Alan Cooper. In those days software applications were based on extensive “user requirements” compiled by business analysts and converted into design specifications. A more productive approach, Cooper felt, was to center design thinking around the needs of a single primary user who could be personified as a fictional character based on the synthesized needs of actual people. That concept resonated with the technology community and personas soon became a standard tool in software development.
Product managers and designers also saw the value in using personas to guide the innovation and development process by minimizing assumptions about what buyers might want while keeping the focus on the needs of “the ideal customer”. And then, as more and more people began to interact across multiple media channels in the 2010s, marketers began to recognize the importance of personas as a means of developing deeper insight into the lives and digital habits of the target audience. Personas became the crucial jumping off point for customer journey design.
Today rich, incredibly detailed personas can be generated automatically using machine learning and artificial intelligence which hoovers up publicly available data from open sources and combines it with internally generated behavioural and survey data. These personas can then help to drive marketing messaging and content creation.
Yet no matter how much time and effort goes into the creation of buyer personas, no matter how enthusiastically they are merchandised, they are only useful if they lead to more buyers willing to buy more of what marketers are trying to sell. Which is why, according to persona design expert Jim Kraus, persona development should revolve around the buying decision and not the buyer. Otherwise, all that effort can easily go to waste, no one really sure how to make optimal use of them.
Ten years ago, Jim Kraus’ company published a groundbreaking book called “Buyer Personas” by the founder Adelle Revella which called for a novel approach to persona design based on a thorough exploration of buyer decision making rather than the invention of fictional buyer profiles. And now a revised and expanded edition of the book has come out which takes into account the more complex business decision making environment of today.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN DM MAGAZINE
