Idea Exchange

   Issue 3.0 – May 2008

Feature Interview

Gray Graffam

Ethnography in Marketing


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Personas: Information or Provocation?


In this issue of Idea Exchange, we focus on personas. Marketers, product managers, Web site developers and salespeople can use personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers. If this subject is fairly new to you, you might find it interesting to visit our Web site first for some background: http://personas.quarry.com.

 

At Quarry, our experience with personas started several years ago, with projects focused on software interface design. Our use of personas soon expanded outward to applications in Web site design, product design, marketing strategy and sales. Along the way, we’ve pondered some interesting questions but none so perennial as this one: What makes these things so darned effective across so many disciplines?

 

As a vehicle for delivering information, the persona has some important challenges. In a business culture that widely salutes the K.I.S.S. principle, the persona defies the “simple” edict with a complex, multi-layered structure. While professionals are typically conditioned to sift out irrelevant facts, the persona encodes details and unapologetically neglects to spell out the significance of these particularities. In short, set against dominant values of the information age, the persona seems an improbable success story. Sure, personas convey information, but perhaps their effectiveness rests to a greater extent on their way of disrupting engrained patterns of thought.

 

Personas remind the designers of products and experiences that they’re dealing with people – not “targets,” not “demographics,” not “segments” – PEOPLE! In our information-saturated time, it’s easy to know everything about a simple artificial construct like a market segment. But even in the information age, “people” retain a shred of mystery. That mystery may, in the end, be an important key to triggering our imagination as we set about our work designing products and experiences for people . . . and anticipating how they will react.



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TrendWatch

Personas Meet Segmentation

 

One trend we've been watching carefully in recent years is the intersection of persona-building with market segmentation. Inevitably this process results in the integration of quantitative and qualitative research methods. And this begs the question whether there is a “best-practice” order of operations.

 

We’ve had an opportunity to look at research methodologies that begin with quantitive and progress to qualitative and those that begin with qualitative and progress to quantitative. While both approaches can work – we’re observing contrasts between them in the kind of utility their outputs will provide.

 

Qualitative-quantitative sequence: Seems well suited to creating a fresh new look at the marketplace – displacing prevailing assumptions about customers and segments. The quantitative follow-up step then tends to layer on a level of “addressability” to the personas based on the kind of demographic data that makes media-buying more effective.

 

Quantitative-qualitative sequence: Seems to produce outcomes that are more consistent with existing segmentation ideas – but it can provide innovative perspectives around (a) gaps in the existing product shelf and (b) how to address segments through creative strategy.

 

It’s too early to report this pattern as a general rule – but it may offer you a filter to consider if you are looking seriously at bringing together the practices of personas and segmentation, and you’re still deciding where to begin.



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Persona Tips

Now That You’ve Got ’Em, How Do You Use ’Em?

 
  • Give your personas a seat at the table: Literally. We've developed large poster-size representations of personas for clients, who even bring them into design meetings. It helps ensure the needs of the personas stay top of mind.
  • Focus on the primary, accommodate the secondary: A primary persona is a customer who won't use your product unless it meets his or her needs. Secondary persona(s) are more forgiving and will generally make do with a product that is designed for the primary persona.
  • Share personas company-wide: If personas don't get circulated beyond product management and marketing, they won't get the respect they deserve. Personas are highly effective at bringing an entire organization together around a shared vision of customer goals and motivations. Share them with everyone, from senior executives to call center staff.
  • Recruit users based on your personas: When it comes time to put your product in front of the user for feedback, consider the traits of your personas and use those to recruit users.

 

Download a full-size sample persona

 


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Practical Wisdom

Q&A with Richard Hill

Richard Hill

Practice Lead: Sales Effectiveness

Quarry Integrated Communications, Inc.

Email: Contact Us

 

Richard consults with companies wanting to increase marketing’s impact on sales. His practice area develops innovative support tools that salespeople actually want to use.

 

If personas have traditionally been the domain of software developers, why are they becoming so well liked and used by sales teams?

 

Just as “design personas” allow developers to think more like their users to build better software, “buyer personas” are enabling salespeople to think more like their customers to win more of their business.

 

When you think about it, companies don’t buy products and services, people do. So it makes perfect sense that sales teams embrace personas as enthusiastically as they do. Personas help salespeople get deeply inside the heads of would-be customers to better understand and empathize with their goals, concerns, preferences and views of the world. And when salespeople understand buyers so intimately, they can better anticipate the articulated and unarticulated needs of different people and tailor conversations accordingly. In this way, personas can help salespeople build credibility and trust faster, and dramatically improve their speed-to-relationship™ with prospects.

 

Many B2B organizations are finding personas to be a helpful tool in equipping reps to have more consultative, solution-selling conversations, where the focus is on what customers want to achieve versus what products the rep has to sell.

 

At Quarry, we feel it’s critical for organizations to make that shift from “offer-centric” to “customer-centric.” In today’s rapidly commoditizing B2B market, it’s no longer what you sell, but how you sell it that is most important.

 

What are some of the other ways in which organizations are benefiting from personas?

 

We see personas as a key tool in the effort to better align sales and marketing and close the gap that exists, in part, because of a lack of shared understanding and language between the two groups. Personas can help bridge that gap and create a common point of view around key issues like: Who are our customers? How do they buy? Why do they buy?

 

How do “buyer personas” need to be different than “design personas”?

 

Our experience suggests that salespeople are working under increasing time-pressure. So to start with, “buyer personas” need to be in a format that is quick and easy for them to access. For instance, should sales personas be presented in print form or should they be delivered in some sort of time-based media (such as audio, video or animation) instead? I think we’ll see some interesting work in that respect in the year ahead.

 

Secondly, we also know that selling is getting harder, in part because more and more people are now involved in making organizational purchase decisions. According to IDC, the number of decision makers involved in a typical B2B sale has now increased to seven. Buyer personas need to be built and presented in a way that helps salespeople navigate through the unique goals and needs of different players at each step of the buying cycle.

 

If buyer personas deal with the goals of buyers and influencers who might be relevant in a sales interaction, then to build them do we need original research on a topic that’s been broadly researched already, or can one set of personas be equally useful for numerous organizations?

 

Perhaps this is the heretical question that will turn this Idea Exchange into a Web 2.0 project. The persona purists will certainly respond with the observation – and they will be correct – that part of the value of a personas project is the organizational learning and refreshing of perspectives that falls out of a research process. That can be invaluable, and I would never want to discourage someone from taking that plunge. That said, the question is valid in situations where resource constraints – time, money or both – preclude the best-practice model.

 

In those cases, we do see the possibility of getting initiatives started by drawing on libraries of standardized role-based personas. Again, that’s an area I expect us to do some interesting work in during the year ahead.



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Feature Interview: Ethnography in Marketing

Gray Graffam, PhD, Consulting Ethnographer interviewed by Glen Drummond
Gray Graffam

Gray Graffam

 

As Professor at University of Waterloo, Gray teaches courses in anthropology, including the design of anthropological inquiry. He has over 30 years of experience in anthropological study, and his recent research focuses on the role of contemporary ethnography in understanding technological innovation and modern communication behaviour. Gray has also worked as a consulting ethnographer in understanding how personas help affect positive business decisions, including the design of effective products, services, and marketing initiatives.

 

 

Glen:

What is the difference between ethnographic research methods and other sorts of methods in obtaining the kind of outcome we’re trying to achieve with personas?
   

Gray:

One of the biggest challenges for many businesses these days – and particularly for those that design products – has to be knowing what people will want, what they want now and what they will want in the future. Part of the way of finding that out is through ethnography and persona research.

 

One of the things with persona research is that it’s a bit more open ended for finding out exactly what it is that people want or how they are organizing their life or how they’re establishing certain kinds of patterns or principles. Sometimes, people are fully aware of these things and can articulate them, and other times they can’t. And the reasons why people behave in a certain way often aren’t as straightforward as we would like to believe.

   

Glen:

And in marketing it seems that, once upon a time, it was possible to define a target, and that target could be completely known on the basis of demographic variables.
   

Gray:

But the world is a much more complex place today. Marketing, therefore, has to be attuned to the fact that it’s not going to be addressing its audience through just a few channels; it’s going to be very splintered. You have splintering of channels, the splintering of targets. It becomes a very difficult exercise to line up how you get a product or a service to an end customer for buying or subscribing.
   

Glen:

Which leads to a very interesting question about context. Let’s suppose you had three different organizations, each of which hired the same group of ethnographers to conduct a persona research study for their respective situation. Company A is in the same industry as Company B but they have different market shares, and Company C is selling a completely different product altogether. Let’s say by some miraculous circumstances it turned out that it was appropriate for the anthropologists to study exactly the same people for each of the three companies. Would we end up with the same personas in two cases, in all three, or would we have three distinct sets of personas?
   

Gray:

My gut reaction is that the results would be different in all three cases. The reason would be that, while the baseline research might be the same, the motivations of each company would affect the resulting personas. Personas are abstractions based out of the research, and they’re meant to serve as a tool around which to organize either innovation of product or service or how you design marketing initiatives.

 

In a situation where you have a company that’s leading in the field with a substantial market share, they’ll probably want to maintain that with a certain complexity of offering that allows them to cover a lot more of the mosaic map that represents the consumer universe. They’re going to be asking the ethnographic team to design to a greater richness, asking them to look at situations that are suitable for niche marketing and how to develop products that are going to then really sing for very tightly-targeted segments of the consumer universe. If they do that, they’re going to be much more successful.

 

On the other hand, Company B might not have the war chest for that kind of depth. They’re going to be asking for a couple of personas that they can organize themselves around. So, chances are they’ll be asking the team to construct a smaller set of personas with a broader sense of overall representation. And, for company C, the personas will depict motivation around a different set of experiences, which will completely alter the resulting personas.

   

Glen:

So, you’ve offered in this observation a working definition of the minimum requirements of a persona: it needs to represent a particular motivation in the context of a particular set of experiences from a particular strategic perspective. I think that’s useful.

 

To build on that, I’ve been thinking about the relationship of identity and motivation in the context of our digitally enabled world. Poststructuralists writing in the 60s and 70s were obviously not referencing Facebook, MySpace or YouTube, but they did seem to anticipate a common thread. In these digital networks there is a deliberate and self-aware construction of the self. Everybody can be their own Madonna.

   

Gray:

Yes, and self-aware construction of self leads to a choice about representation. In a nutshell, actions are the result of motivations. Poststructuralists have tended to reject the idea of “self” as a single coherent whole. Today, we are on arguably safer ground thinking about how people have multiple social identities. In terms of a digitally enabled world, the presentation of self is multifaceted. As an example, someone might have one type of self presented on Facebook, and a somewhat other type of self presented on LavaLife, and still another type of self presented on an online chat room. There’s no getting around it, people are complex and at times down-right messy. Changing circumstances, different communication tools, different online vehicles, and different motivations facilitate a myriad of social identities and various representations of self.
   

Glen:

I think that topic leads us to another conversation about the prospects of doing ethnography online and understanding how some of these principles we’ve been talking about apply in the online world.
   

Gray:

The beauty about doing online research is you do not start online. There’s a classic study in terms of the anthropology of the Internet by Miller and Slater, published in 20001. One of their main points is that if you want to understand how people use the Internet, don’t start with the Internet, start with the people. It’s then that you gain an understanding of what the Internet means to them, and it evolves and changes from there. You come from the outside in, not the inside out.
   

Glen:

Which I think is highly relevant to the relationship of ethnography to marketing today. I think one of the things this conversation has helped clarify is the location of the persona in a matrix that includes the motivation of the individual, the field of experience that is given by the industry and the set of strategic considerations of the organization. It is a definition of what a persona represents – it’s that point of intersection that becomes the starting point for an effective conversation between brands and their customers.

 

1 Miller, D. and Slater, D. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.

 



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