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.

Comments

[Tony Zambito]

Angela,

Very nice post. With the recent confusion surrounding persona types and especially buyer personas, your organization of distinctive persona types is very helpful. Nice work.

Tony

[Nick Trendov]

Angela,
I believe that this blog is one of the most innovative regarding the use of Personae though I hope that those new to the concept move beyond the labels to get more value.

In my experience Persona behaviour can span a web site and incorporated some or most of behaviours that you list, including Buyer Persona, Stakeholder Persona, etc...

The catagories you list are extremely important for those new to Personae and allow them to grasp the core values that they unlock. Once they get to this point I would suggest that you might want to consider that any individual can pick up and remove Persona masks at will and that one person can move from Persona to Persona at will according to their objectives and their measures of success.

What then is the next value layer for Persona practitioners?
Imagine that a Persona can span multiple channels when interacting with an organization, from bricks to clicks to call centres. Another dimension is the possibility that the person behind the Persona may buy or interact on behalf of someone else and take on their Persona. Indeed they may go to the same site or company again and exhibit another Persona behaviour.

As Persona practitioners or stewards of web sites, call centres or physical stores we should accomodate behaviours first, then Persona and finally market segments. Each complements the other though it is my experience that the only way you can predict what someone will do is to ask them to declare the behaviour that is important to them. While the way developers and some marketers use Personas is better that the old market segmentation models, accomodating mutlple Persona behaviours appears to add a flexibility and fluidity for both the seeker or buyer and host or seller.

Cheers,
Nick

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In my experience Persona behaviour can span a web site and incorporated some or most of behaviours that you list, including Buyer Persona, Stakeholder Persona, etc...