Persona Creation

Tell Me A Story

The whole point of personas, especially buyer personas, is to tell a story about customers.  If storytelling sounds too fluffy for the workplace consider these two points:  (1) data—including all that expensive market research—is dry, dull, drab, dreary, dusty, and difficult to digest;  and (2) humans are hardwired for narrative.

 

Stephen Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, called humans “the primate who tells stories.”  Because storytelling was one of our first forms of communication, we humans have thousands of years of genetic experience digesting information in narrative format.  Quite simply, we have come to crave stories.  You can observe the result of this hunger and narrative expertise the next time you are in a room where “serious” business has been discussed and someone says, “Bear with me while I tell you a story.”  Take a look around to see if people’s body language changes.  Do they sit back in their seats, pick up their mugs, or generally show signs of settling in and relaxing to listen?  Do they put their pens down, perhaps because they know a story will be easy to listen to, understand, and remember?  We process information best when it is presented in narrative form.  We can recall it better later, too.  And perhaps most importantly, we enjoy it.

 

Scientist and storyteller Kendal Haven, in Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story, says “I have reviewed over 350 research studies from fifteen separate fields of science.  Incredibly, every one of those studies, as well as every study they cite—every one—agrees that stories are an effective and efficient vehicle for . . . the general communication of factual information . . . .” (p. 4)  He goes on to explain how he changed his career as a scientist to that of a storyteller because he recognized that no one wanted to read his factual reports.  Today he teaches scientists how to write stories about their research.

 

If scientists are investigating stories and using them to communicate information, marketers should find it easy to embrace their power.  As marketers, we know that stories are important; we use them all the time to communicate with customers.  Yet many of us feel reluctant to use stories as internal communication tools.  We need to get past that stigma.  Personas are a tool to disseminate research in the form of fictional but accurate stories that our colleagues will easily understand and immediately use.  Because market research is often overwhelming or quickly forgotten, personas and scenarios may be the best way to mine value from that research.  Personas are great at taking a mass of information and both simplifying it and holding the pertinent complexity of the data. Personas and scenarios are the communication tool that can make research memorable, relevant, and focused.

As storytelling advocate Andy Goodman says, “Numbers numb, jargon jars, and nobody ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart."  But we are all captivated by stories.  So don't be shy about telling stories at work.  Dig into the customer data and use buyer personas to make it come alive. 

Recession Fear: Information Boom

The time when people are worried about recession is the time to focus on the buyer; when people are worried about money is the best time to understand what drives them.  This is also the perfect moment to create buyer personas.  If you are a B2B company, your customers’ tight budgets result either in buying freezes or in more complex buying processes and longer cycles.  This is the time to learn about those buyers’ pressure points.  This is also the time to create buyer personas and customer ecosystems depicting those pivotal issues.  If you can communicate the goals, frustrations, and complex processes of buyers during a time fraught with recession fears, you will likely generate truly useful insights about how to talk to them and satisfy their needs, now and in more prosperous times. 

 

If you aren’t sure how to go about the process of developing buyer personas, Goal Centric is offering Buyer Persona Creation Workshops around the country, with the first one near the San Francisco Airport on July 28 & 29, 2008.  I hope to see you there.

Persona Quality Scale

Thank you to Steve Mulder for his recent post on Practical Personas about the persona quality scale idea I introduced in "Beyond Fake Personas."  I agree with Steve, it would be helpful for anyone who touches personas if we could do four things:  

1. Adopt a common vocabulary that indicates the personas’ rigor;
2. Always provide information about the number of users who sit behind the personas;
3. Note how we conducted the research and identify which persona components are quantitatively or qualitatively derived; and also
4. Offer up options for "improvement" if the personas had to be created quickly. 

At some point, persona creation methodology will be more standardized, with rigorous quantitative research a necessity.  I certainly appreciate Steve's efforts to develop and identify tools for a quantitative persona creation process.  In the meantime, and as he noted in his “Quantitative Personas: Not Always Necessary” post, I would not want to discourage potential persona developers.  A quality scale like the one I suggest seems to allow for both lighter-weight projects and deeper investments, while labeling each appropriately.

Start With Stakeholder Interviews

To create the right personas for your organization, you must have input from two sources:  customers and employees.  Stakeholder interviews are the process we use for gathering information from the latter.

 

As an outside firm, it is obvious to us (because we have to first learn all the issues) that stakeholder interviews are a necessary first step in any persona creation process.  If you are an employee about to create personas, you might think your day-to-day interactions with co-workers have told you enough about why personas could be useful.  That is a bad assumption.  Instead, use stakeholder interviews as an opportunity to actually discuss the issues with your co-workers. Schedule a 15- to 30-minute (or longer) meeting with key stakeholders and dig in to their opinions, experiences, assumptions, expectations, biases, and measurements for a successful persona creation project.

 

Why?  Because personas are an innovation tool that can only work well if you understand clearly who is trying to be creative, what problems they have that need creative resolution, and why they need impetus to help focus their innovations.  Your personas must be crafted to help specific people within your organization solve specific problems.  Randomly generated profiles of customers are not enough.

 

If you are creating user personas, talk to developers, designers, product managers, product marketers, market researchers, and any directors or upper-level management who have a stake in the product’s success.  If you are creating buyer personas, talk to sales people, sales support, marketing managers, marketing communications managers, product marketing managers, product managers, web site managers, market researchers, and any directors or upper-level management who have a stake in the campaign’s success.  Invest 15 or 30 minutes with each of these co-workers to understand their challenges before you claim to be able to help them with those challenges.  Your personas will be more useful and successful tools as a result.

Nice Persona, But Is It Useful?

A recent client hired us to revise the personas they had created. The departments using them had sent the personas back to the product marketing managers with the complaint that the personas were: “Nice, but completely useless.”  The company was in danger of deciding to abandon personas entirely, so we started with conversations about what “useful” meant to that company. Although they never said it directly, we eventually inferred that they wanted the personas to provide certain constructive constraints to fuel marketing ideas.

“I play better tennis because the court is there.”  —Robert Frost

The purpose of personas is to engender innovation by supplying limitations.  The purpose of personas is to illuminate opportunities for new and better ideas.  The purpose of personas is to distill customer data down to a narrow but accurate field of ideas that will have the best chance of success. 

How? Part One: A Set of Limitations

1. Personas describe the distinguishing attributes of the group of people who will use or buy your product. They narrow the field (market), define the market, and describe it in detail.
2. Personas describe the goals of the people who use or buy your product.  They focus employees’ attention on relieving any frustration that customers experience when they use or buy your product.
3. Persona scenarios describe exactly what people who use or buy your product do to achieve their goals. They show specific “moments” when there is an opportunity to satisfy customers better.

Those attributes, goals, and scenarios provide limitations; they act as Frost’s tennis court. They give your company the opportunity to close the gap between what customers currently experience and what they would enjoy more (even if they don’t know it yet).  Personas engender innovation by highlighting that gap and by showing that gap in a human context, as close to reality as possible.

How? Part Two: A Custom-Made Tool

Although personas represent customers by translating customer data, they are fashioned and formed from the goals of the employees who must use them.  Personas are only useful if they are crafted out of the organization’s goals.  Personas must be a useful tool in the hands of the employees who are charged to innovatively close the gap.  Persona scenarios must show details (based on customer research) about typical customers engaged in typical activities:  how a user sets up a new account; how a buyer gathers pricing information; how and why a user determines when to charge a draining battery; or how and why a buyer decides to place an order on your web site versus over the phone.  Personas and their scenarios must illustrate customers’ goals so that your employees can work within the limitation of having to satisfy those goals.

If a persona or set of personas does not elicit better messaging, sales processes, product designs, or web site navigation (to name a few kinds of innovation), then the personas have failed.  If employees don’t find the personas useful, then they are just another “interesting” customer profiling effort destined for the round file.

Our client’s product marketing managers worked with us to define what “useful personas” would actually be able to do, and together we found that the “nice” personas needed scenarios that showed specifically how customers compared competitors’ products.  Once clarified, the newly relevant personas helped the client’s marketing teams focus on creating better comparison tools. When we followed up later, the client said: “Yes, the new personas help. A lot!”

"Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work . . ."  —Rollo May

Beyond Fake Personas

Glen Drummond, Partner at Quarry Integrated Communications posed the question to me recently, “If personas are fictional, how do you tell when a persona is fake?” This great question highlights concerns about persona quality, validity, and usefulness that our clients often raise and that many persona thought leaders have addressed (Adele Revella, Jared Spool, Steve Mulder, Kim Goodwin, and others). 

At Goal Centric, my partner Tony Zambito and I have developed a scale of persona quality for our B2B clients.  It is based primarily on the depth of ethnographic research behind the persona, whether quantitative research supports those qualitative findings, and whether the persona can actually help its audience.  I’ll start at the low end and ascend to the highest quality persona.

Persona Sketch

A Persona Sketch is a persona profile that you create off the top of your head based on what you think you know about customers, thanks to either personal experience or long tenure inside your industry.  You complete this sketch in about 15 minutes.  It is the equivalent of the proverbial “napkin drawing”; slightly stained with coffee and wadded up in your pocket.  In other words, it may be a good beginning persona creation exercise for you personally, but you should never pass it around at work.

When you conduct internal stakeholder interviews, you will bump up against your coworkers’ latent persona sketches.  These are the assumptions and biases that people in your company hold about customers.  Part of your job as you go about your persona creation project is to first uncover and then either validate or disqualify your company’s de facto persona sketches.

Persona Hypothesis

A Persona Hypothesis isn’t a persona at all; it is a rough outline (often in list form) of the customer goals and patterns you expect to encounter in your field work.  After you have completed internal stakeholder interviews and internal research interviews, you have enough information to create a Persona Hypothesis. But, true to good scientific methodology, you create this hypothesis with the intention of trying to disprove it out in the field. 

A Persona Hypothesis may be more rigorous than a Persona Sketch, but is never an end deliverable.  We only ever show clients our persona hypotheses as one of many steps in the process toward Robust Personas, a process which everyone understands will include ethnographic field work and analysis.

Provisional Persona

A Provisional Persona is an incomplete persona, and as such is a dangerous deliverable, but it is a persona we feel comfortable enough to introduce to our clients (with appropriate disclaimers).  A Provisional Persona is based in research and includes detailed information gathered from real customers, but for various reasons is not sufficient to constitute a Robust Persona.  Those reasons usually include some version of “there wasn’t enough data”:  either we couldn’t find enough customers to interview in the time allotted; there was not enough correlating quantitative data to support our findings; or, we started to identify very interesting patterns that need more follow up.  We often show the persona as a grayscale drawing instead of as a color photograph.

Provisional Personas are also necessary when a company has not first adopted a market segmentation.  If you try to create personas, especially buyer personas, without an already adopted segmentation, your field work will likely be scattered across too wide a customer population to generate focused personas. In that case, Provisional Personas can serve as a beginning point for a segmentation project, but should never be used in lieu of a thorough segmentation.

Provisional Personas are just that: temporary, tentative, and conditional.  Use them only sparingly and deliver them with disclaimers and provisos.

Robust Personas

Robust Personas are personas we can stand behind with confidence.  We have conducted stakeholder interviews, internal research interviews, general industry and domain research, ethnographic field research, and we have tried hard to shoot holes in what we have found.  We have conducted as many in-person ethnographic interviews as possible in each target segment or sub-segment.  We have identified patterns of thought or behavior only if we have seen them occur multiple times.  We have sifted through existing quantitative and other qualitative research to confirm or refute what we have seen.  And as we developed the personas, we asked refining questions with follow-up phone interviews.  Our personas look and act like real customers, which we have confirmed through preliminary introductions to select customer-facing employees in customer service, support, and sales.  We confidently deliver these personas to our client with few, if any disclaimers.

Complete Personas

Complete Personas embody the highest level of rigor and customer research investment, and take months to develop.  They include all the background work that goes into the Robust Persona (above), but they are even more rooted in extensive research and analysis.  When we create these personas, as many of their attributes, goals, and behaviors as possible include footnote citations to specific quantitative and qualitative research studies (beyond our own field research).  The personas are not only representatives of established customer segments, they are portals into the company’s existing market research.  Each persona acts as a shelf in the market research library.  And of highest importance, each persona includes revenue and expense analyses.  How much revenue does this persona represent to the company?  What makes this type of customer expensive or affordable to keep?  What priority does this persona receive for product innovation and upgrades, for targeted messaging and campaigns, for sales representatives’ time and attention?  These personas make both your most rigorous market researchers and your executives happy, not to mention the marketers, designers, developers, and sales people who get to use these personas to fine-tune their work.

All five of the above persona types are fictional, but only the first one, the Persona Sketch, is fake.  And even then, the Persona Sketch can be a useful way to start a persona creation project.  The danger is when you or someone else tries to pass off a Persona Sketch, a Persona Hypothesis, or a Provisional Persona as a Robust Persona.  Be clear about how much research sits behind the personas you create and don’t release Persona Sketches, Persona Hypotheses, or even Provisional Personas into environments that will believe they can be used as if they were Robust Personas.

Persona Types

If you are “creating personas to represent customers” make sure you know which type of customer you need to represent.  Is this customer a consumer or another business (B2C or B2B)?  Will the customer use your company’s product or service, or buy it, or both?  Make sure you know what type of persona you are trying to create.

User Persona

This persona uses the product (software, web site, physical item) or service to achieve a goal.  The features of the product help him achieve his goal.  He may use one or two features or everything that is available.  The user may also be the buyer, as is often the case for consumers.  User personas can be further classified into:

• Novice user persona
• Intermediate user persona
• Perpetual intermediate user persona
• Power user persona

Your quantitative and qualitative research will tell you which type of user persona you should design for.

Buyer Persona

This persona buys the product or service and may or may not actually use the product.  This is true both in consumer family situations where, for example, a parent makes buying decisions for a child, or in a work environment where a manager buys a product for other employees that she may know personally or may never have met.  Buyer personas can be further classified into:

• Evaluating Buyer: gathers information about purchase options (i.e., the persona who interacts most closely with your Web site or sales team during the pre-decision phase) and reports findings and opinion to the economic or technical buyer.
• Economic Buyer: controls the ultimate decision to release funds for the purchase.
• Technical Buyer: has technical expertise that influences the purchase decision.
• Orderer: actually orders the product or service.

Obviously, not all of these roles may be necessary as there is a great deal of overlap in many situations. Your quantitative and qualitative research will indicate which roles are important to create.

Stakeholder or Influential Persona

This persona represents an important player who neither uses nor buys your product or service.  In the family example, a mother may have strong opinions about types of video games that are appropriate for a 7-yr-old, but the father buys the product and the son uses it.  In a corporate environment, a buyer persona may be a manager, a user persona may be an employee, but an end consumer may have a stake in the results of that employee’s use of the product. So a stakeholder persona may be an end-consumer, a competitor, a government regulator, a vendor, or others who have strong opinions or experience some affect from the use of your product.

Web Site Persona

Web sites satisfy many different types of goals and sometimes must consider visitors as both users and buyers.  These user-buyer personas have layered goals that require special attention and handling.

Organizational Persona

An organizational persona is a fictional representation of a customer that is an entire company.  If you provide B2B products and services, then your personas are customer organizations with identified key role personas (user personas, buyer personas, and stakeholder personas) inside them.

Before you start creating personas, make sure you know which types you will need and why.  And as always, before you do anything else, get out there and actually talk to your customers.