The Problem with Personas

You can’t get three clinks into the marketingweb without running up against the idea of personas, complete with a downloadable whitepaper with “7 steps” to creating them.

I’ll say at the beginning that I’m not a huge fan of personas…and here I am thinking about them in a B2B context. Not the concept, but rather how they are executed in real time.

The idea is sound; Try to understand the people in your market and segment them into meaningful groups. Get your mind around what their life is like and what motivates them. What are their stressors? What are their goals? How many kids do they have?

Personas are then humanized. They are attributed to one person, with a face and a mini-bio, etc.

The persona movement is really just an extension of the things that have been going on for a long time. Remember the Claritas segmenting—we learned about “Grumpy Seniors” and “Travelling DINKs.”

According to the CXL Institute, “the problem with many personas is that they’re either based on irrelevant data, poorly sourced data, or no data at all.”

In my view, this is 100% correct. You can feel it when you read them. The sweet smell of data is replaced by the stench of self-serving wishful thinking.

You see things like this. (I’m exaggerating for effect)

• What keeps her [the persona profile] up at night is trying to find a uniform D-shaped hasp that can replace the need for custom fabrication.

• His biggest problem at work is managing multiple vendors. He wishes he could find a single source.

  …or….

• He senses he’s not getting what he needs from his full-service agency and wonders if he can’t find out how to have specialist agencies do the same work.

Digression:

Anyway, back to business. In my experience, the alignment between a persona’s deepest desire and the company’s sales proposition is often disturbingly close.

The other objection I have is that they are usually very broad. You could find this person, reach this person, and find out they are paralyzingly risk-adverse. Where’s that persona? Or being ruthlessly micro-managed. Or incompetent. Where’s the apathetic persona?

What’s the better way?

• Use real data. Combing through studies, secondary data, web usage data, any customer surveys, as well as the brains of the people who are with customers all the time (don’t forget inside sales). What are they seeing in people?

• Instead of focusing on how your product fits their needs, put a larger focus on what’s keeping them from buying. See how different this feels:

  • They don’t know about you.

  • They have a current vendor.

  • They heard something bad about you.

  • They are too busy even to think about it.

  • They tried outsourcing 10 years ago and it didn’t work.

  • The CFO won’t let them.

  • They don’t understand what you do.

  • Etc.

• Lastly, and possibly most importantly, all this stuff is useful when you are attempting to find your way through the haystack of humanity. Once you find your needle, you want to transition from talking about people “like” your customer to talking to your customer about their needs. No two are alike.

  • Edelman’s Brandshare says that customers report that this happens only 10% of the time.

In the end, we do learn from stories, and personas are an extension of that. Stories are so powerful, in fact, that we have to make sure we’re not telling false ones to ourselves.