An interview on personas and marketing with...ME!
Thursday, August 23, 2007 at 12:53AM I did an interview with my friend and colleague Sally McKenzie on personas and marketing. We talked about how marketers should be involved in the persona creation process, common questions and concerns about the use of personas, the relationship between personas and other tools (like market segmentation), and how to ensure that a persona effort goes well. Check out the entire interview or the 'best of' below.
I like this section, where Sally talks about the relationship between market segments and personas. We discuss the different uses for each of these types of information, and the fact that internalized knowledge of your team is sometimes just as valuable as data:
TA: ....The other thing for marketers to remember is that personas are not about targeting. For targeting, you you'd want to figure out what kind of magazines Henrietta reads so you can publicize your value proposition to her in a way she will see it. For experience design (and in this case, I'm talking about 'product' as the web site designed to sell face cream) is really about how she wants to shop for and select a face cream. What kind of questions does she have that need to be answered in order for her to make the decision to actually press the button and purchase?
SM: When you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense because customer segments and personas basically have two different purposes in the organization. You need customer segments to focus your marketing activity and target your communication. You need personas to be able to design the right kind of user experience. So, you are implying that the use of real customer data in creating personas helps to bridge the gap between segments and personas, right? You can use the data in the segments to help create the personas.
TA: Yes, you can, and you should use data to create the personas, and this definitely includes all kinds of data collected by marketing. But what if you don't have the data? Lots of companies can't afford to collect lots of external data. This may sound a little bit heretical, but there's another way to think about data. The knowledge of the customer base that exists within the organization and all of the different brains is valuable data - just as valuable as the external data you collect.
The first thing I think is so helpful about personas is it gets all that knowledge on the table. Once you can share all the knowledge and assumptions that internal stakeholders have in their heads, you can make sure everyone is aligned in their thinking. The power of that agreement is so strong that in some ways you get 80% of the benefit of the personas right there. If you've been in a company for a while, the stuff in your head is not completely ad hoc. It's stuff you know and have absorbed. Having said that, there are several ways that real data can be really important. If you are in an environment that is very data driven and people won't even listen to you unless you have data, you need to bring in 'real' data.
Read the whole interview on Sally's blog.
Reader Comments (2)
By moses mehraban on October 24th, 2007 at 3:47 am
Hi Tamara,
I really enjoy reading your interviews and blog posts. Do you plan to continue posting on your blog?
I hope, that’s a yes : ) … keep up the great work!
A fan,
Moses
Thanks for taking this opportunity to talk about this, I feel fervently about it and I like learning about this subject will keep your new article.tag heuer 2000Thank you for your sharing! replica rolex watch