Posts under ‘Customer Insight’

This is the eighth in a series of articles examining ways to thrive, not just survive, in 2009.
In a recent poll of 450-plus marketers globally, The CMO Council found that only 6% of marketers claim to have an excellent understanding of their customers when it comes to demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data. (Source: Business Gain […]

From a marketing discipline standpoint, we ask: Did they see it or not? Did they process it or not? There’s another question: How meaningful was that, how involving, how deeply moving was that particular idea or experience? Do the quantitative sciences bring anything to this? What are the natural ranges of the way brains work? Do people process information the same way, or are there really quite significant differences from individual to individual in the way they respond?

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.

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.

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 […]

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.