B2BMX2018

A BRAND TRANSFORMATION PERSPECTIVE From Vulnerable to Advantaged Six types of personas on the road to customer-centricity 3 From our perspective, it's a bit ironic that even the people in the business of creating personas could be accused of a product- centric way of seeing the world. But, the assortment of existing persona types— absent a navigational map that clarifies the relationship between them—creates a complexity that is making it hard for persona buyers. Let's say you're responsible for your organization's web redesign and content creation. You might find yourself asking: • Do I need buyer personas or web design personas? Or both? • If there are already personas available in my organization, should I be using them or creating something new, purpose-built for my project? • Are the personas that exist in my organization different in kind or quantity of information? • Does one type of persona nest inside another like a set of Russian Babushka nesting dolls, or are they as different as Barbie and Batman? • How do I compare the offerings and the price points of the various vendors who want to help me create personas? The complexity suggested by these questions begs for a more formal typology, a more systematic categorization of personas and their value. A critical and under-appreciated dimension There's another complexity that we need to sort out in a new typology of personas —and it has to do with the relationship between personas and the implicit or explicit customer segmentation model already in use by an organization. It's a challenge that we have discovered through our consulting and industry research. Some rare, forward-looking organizations have built a strategic customer segmentation framework based on deep customer insight, have embedded that segmentation perspective in personas and have then mandated the use of these personas across the business as a whole. It's an approach that we believe is ideally suited to fueling a customer-centric culture, and the design and delivery of consistent brand experiences across all customer touch points. The problem The single term "personas" currently stands for a broad diversity of practices and assumptions. How can persona buyers and users clearly specify the work they need, and arrive at a scope of value that is right for their particular business challenge? Why this happens "Personas" stands for vastly different ambition levels in effort and investment, different viewpoints on appropriate scope of use, and different theories of what a persona should include. Current persona labels (e.g. buyer persona, design persona, marketing persona) add confusion because the terms do not correspond to a single model that organizes types of personas in logical relationship to one other. The solution A persona typology that defines six different kinds of personas, and structures each in relationship to the others according to three dimensions: insight methods, segmentation perspectives and disruptive capabilities. The result is a systematic way to compare relative quality between types of personas and to clarify which type of persona is best suited to a particular business objective. PERSPECTIVE IN BRIEF: Six types of personas on the road to customer-centricity

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