The Perils of Relying Only on Personas

In the persona marketing strategy, marketers create distinct customer profiles of typical customers, outlining such factors as their product preferences, the needs and aspirations that drive those preferences, their shopping habits and generalizations of other factors affecting their buying decisions. Personas are even given a first name to make them, well, more personable.

Personas were developed by companies pioneering the transformation from product-centricity to customer-centricity. Personas provided a simple approach to segmentation, customer identification, and relevance in response to a lack of customer information or a limited view into existing data. These pioneers leveraged this basic demographic segmentation to rally the organization around the customer from the perspective of merchandising, store operations, marketing, communications, and so on.

Since its introduction, persona marketing has evolved significantly. The pioneers launched their personas with a test-and-tweak approach, and based on their learnings have adjusted how they focus on and deliver customer solutions. Other companies, after discovering the drawbacks of depending only on personas, began integrating other methods of developing customer views.

Such evolution was necessary because relying only on personas presents a number of inherent dangers, among them creating one-dimensional stereotypes. Other persona perils:

Overlooking or discounting individuals or entire segments. Many loyal customers don’t fit into broad personality-based segments, no matter how inclusive they seek to be. At the extreme, personas can be outright exclusionary.

Directed irrelevance. Suppose a persona defines “George” as a well-to-do customer. Employees would then comfortably pitch higher-end products even though the “George” they’re speaking with has a considerably smaller budget but the same product needs. Such variations aren’t easy to pick out, and lead to knowing the customer less, not more.

Inflexibility. Personas are good lay tools for communicating segmentation to those employees who are unaccustomed to customer research, yet those same employees are also unaccustomed to flexible reactions to that research. Persona segmentation requires stable, long-term commitment, which can further limit the customer approach.

Missed opportunities. Relying on personas and their lack of specificity can blind you to the potential range of segmentation that you might employ. You can’t just presume that because customers can be logically bucketed into a certain segment that the segmentation defines exactly who they are and their precise needs.

Still, the philosophy of the persona with its customer-centric view and focus on demographic, lifestyle and motivations can have a number of advantages:

A place to start. A limited customer view is better than no customer view at all. Defining personas is the potential first step in establishing a customer-centric corporate mindset and in giving associates a better view into the different needs of the customers. But you must work to evolve your segmentation and leverage the actual transactional data.

Visualization of customer-centricity. Personas can put a face not only on the customer but also on the customer strategy. A persona is almost like a branding tool. It’s not so much a segmentation approach as it is a way to skin your segmentation.

Visualization for external corporate communications. Putting a persona skin on a segmentation strategy has proven to be effective with Wall Street analysts, investors and the press. Helping these audiences understand such long-term strategies using items in the traditional financial toolbox can be a struggle.

A non-marketing segmentation language. When soliciting feedback from other departments and from the field, personas can help non-marketers get their arms around the segments conversationally, facilitating more real-world analysis. From that perspective you might look at personas as kind of a segmentational language, giving segmentation a little more enterprise power and accessibility to draw people into a total effort.

A guide to customer communication styles and approaches. Personas can guide the tone and manner of communications, but can’t dictate the specific content. Assuming that an offer is relevant to customers because they fit into a persona box is very risky versus triggered communications based on demonstrated behavior. Loyalty and relevance must flow from the transactional data and preference information you’ve collected from specific customers, and savvy loyalty marketers must ensure that the personas don’t get in the way of more-relevant customer conversations.

Additional perspective and opportunity. Different customer views through alternate or secondary segmentation can inform your approach to the primary segmentation—and vice versa, with the possibility of transactional analytics and segmentation identifying new personas, and the personas themselves fueling ways to interpret and respond to transactional patterns.

When personas first took the stage, companies organized entire marketing, merchandising and advertising teams around these specific demographic segments. By continuing to evolve our customer-centric strategies, carefully layering various demographic and lifestyle views into customers onto core transactional data, we can create rich customer perspectives, and rescue consumers from the perils of personas.

Dan Ribolzi is a consultant at LoyaltyOne. He can be reached at [email protected].