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.
