B2BMX2018

A BRAND TRANSFORMATION PERSPECTIVE From Vulnerable to Advantaged Six types of personas on the road to customer-centricity 10 The spectrum of values along the z-axis progresses from "vulnerable to disruption" in the lower-left quadrant to "ability to disrupt" in the upper right. Further applying a simple color coding to the "L-shaped" bands in the graph, we reflect that those organizations with shadow, zombie or phantom personas are more susceptible to being disrupted. Here's why: • Shadow personas represent a safe haven for potential disruptors to establish a market foothold. • Zombie personas can mislead innovation efforts and create an opening for potential competitors to deliver experiences that customers in the category prefer. • Phantom personas can mislead organizations by drawing attention to differences between customers that do not actually matter when it comes to creating engaging and meaningful customer experiences, which leaves the door open for competitive disruption. In contrast, those companies that have adopted better-quality methods for gathering insight, and approached their personas with a deliberate segmentation perspective, are in an optimal position to disrupt their markets through a highly customer-centric approach: • Design personas help ensure that single experiences are based on relevant customer insights and tuned to the customer's motivations, goals and behaviors. • Experience design personas go a long way to setting an organization apart from its competitors on the basis of a consistent and meaningful customer experience across multiple touch points. • Omni-channel experience design personas not only fuel the integration of customer experiences across all touch points, but have the support of executive leadership, are embedded in processes and practices, and serve as a continually updated body of strategic insight, which puts the organization in an optimal position to differentiate itself on the basis of the customer experience it delivers. The comparison of the different personas in the typology along the z-axis (disruptive capabilities) could lead one to ask whether there is a right time and place for the design persona. The answer is an enthusiastic "yes!" The primary driver of that enthusiasm is the topic of innovation, and the critical role that pilots, prototypes and experiments play in the pursuit of innovation. With innovation initiatives, you often need to go beyond the boundaries of the officially sanctioned model of the customer. And, usually, there needs to be some sort of measured experiment or a pilot-based approach to create the internal permission for pioneering work to take place. Design personas can play an instrumental role in such experiments and pilots. We've seen design personas employed very successfully in innovation initiatives dealing with new customer interaction models, new product design or re-invention, and new marketing content approaches. In these contexts, design personas are valuable tools that are well matched to the time and budget scale of most innovation initiatives. Furthermore, design personas improve the chance of success in these initiatives. And, in those cases where the initiatives prove successful, the primary research and insight that went into the design persona can be re-leveraged in building a more integrated customer insight framework for your organization. INNOVATING WITH DESIGN PERSONAS

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