B2BMX2018

A BRAND TRANSFORMATION PERSPECTIVE From Vulnerable to Advantaged Six types of personas on the road to customer-centricity 2 How much longer before the term "personas" becomes useless? Give any business buzzword time and it loses much of its power to communicate. "Best practices," "re-engineering," "CRM" and "leadership" are just a few examples of business terms that have been drained of meaning. Such terms are eventually discarded like fast-food cartons littering the freeway of business thought. The reasons for this phenomenon are varied, but the usual suspects include misapplication of the term, over use, an association with unfulfilled promises and being replaced by the next "big thing". The term "personas" is trending towards this low-energy state. There have never been more people involved in creating and using personas, and yet we see substantial disagreement about how they work, why they work, what should go into them and under what circumstances they should be put into action. We've encountered clients who—responding to a negative reputation for personas within their organizations— say: "I know I need personas, but let's not use that term when we're speaking with anyone else inside my organization." To quote content marketing thought leader Michael Brenner: "Personas are great, except when they suck." The problem with using the single term "personas" to describe all types is magnified when we start discussing the kind of persona we need to create. We trip over the lack of a shared vocabulary to describe the different types of personas. From our perspective, there's a critical need for a formal typology of personas that buyers and users of personas can align around. How existing, informal persona typologies are failing persona buyers To the extent that there are existing typologies of personas in the marketplace, they are informal ones. We've seen a number of adjectives bolted on to the front of personas by specialists in various areas: "buyer personas," "web design personas," "marketing personas." Advocates for these specialized versions of personas make a valid argument that the intended end-use application of the persona should be connected with the information that is included in the persona. But, in our experience, when it comes to determining the relative quality of these types of personas, the primary focus narrows to its content—the rigor of how the content was established, and the degree to which that content is matched to the intended end-use application of the persona. The typology that we propose identifies another dimension that has an important influence on the value of a persona.

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