Personas
Personas allow you to understand who your customers really are, what they care about and what motivates their behavior so you can better connect with them.
A persona represents a set of customers who have similar behaviors, attitudes, goals, and motivations. They behave similarly in the way they shop, feel about a product category, approach technology, use customer service, etc. They are based on psychographics and behaviors rather than demographics – each persona type behaves similarly regardless of age, gender, education, and other typical demographics.
We’ve used personas to help our clients develop brand platforms, create more engaging messaging, design new products, create effective point-of–sale materials, develop tools to enhance the shopping experience, create customer journey maps and more.
Bringing Your Personas to Life
After making the significant investment in developing personas, the process is incomplete if your internal stakeholders are unaware they exist, or only have a superficial understanding.
Our persona work includes an interactive “Strategy and Insights Infusion Workshop” where we immerse branding, innovation, strategy, and marketing teams in the insights we’ve discovered and help drive action planning for next steps.
Here are a few of our favorite approaches to socializing your personas for maximum impact:
- Designing custom snapshots of each persona
- Creating videos introducing you to each persona
- Organizing an in-persona Persona Fair
- Creating a digital or in-person Artifact Gallery to explore
- And other immersion materials like posters, persona cards, brochures, and more
Check out our video that introduces you to a fictitious “Keep Me Active Dog Owner” persona. Video is an amazing tool for evoking empathy for your consumers. It creates an immediate emotional connection with the persona being “real”.
Our Approach
Personas are created through the synthesis of observations and research with a large number of customers. The strength in our methodology lies in our combined qualitative and quantitative research approach that allows us to gain a deep understanding of the mindset and behaviors of customers.
We first conduct in-depth qualitative research to immerse ourselves in the lives of customers and observe their day-to-day activities and emotions – where they work and live. These observations, both in person and digitally, allow us to deeply understand attitudes, emotions, behaviors, goals, motivators, cultural and social influences.
The in-depth qualitative research helps us develop detailed batteries in the quantitative research that not only inform the clustering of the personas, but also provide rich in-depth characterizations of each persona. The quantitative research also allows for sizing the personas to inform decisions on where to focus efforts.
Check out our Quirks article that talks about how we helped Monrovia dig deep with their customers to develop gardener personas.
You can also learn more by reading our blog post We have personas… now what? Bring your Personas to Life!