Marketing Persona

When I entered this class I had no concept of a persona as a marketing tool, let alone how useful it could be. After reading the chapter on persona lifestyles, it became very clear what benefits a company can gain by spending time to appropriately develop personas. In the same way Steve Jobs intuitively used a persona for the apple customer when developing the first iPod, everyone can benefit by clearly defining the target customer and what needs/pain points the product will address. In this way we can assure that the product, whatever it may be, under development is not over developed and try to be everything to everyone, but rather very focused on its purpose and abilities. Much in the same way that flip video cameras are.

With that new knowledge I can now undertake the role of a marketing professional in the process of developing a persona. My primary goal is to define the questions which will provide me with insight about the persona. Clearly defining questions is a key part of this project, if we get into too many specific of any particular individual our persona will not be representative of a market segment but rather be too much of an individual. Getting too detailed will give us a lot of information about a particular person, but does that really help us develop something which needs to appeal to the “masses”. On the other hand we do not want to be overly general as this would provide us no real data to work with.

Firstly I am concerned with what is the age and sex of my persona, for our purposes the persona is a 28 year old male. Once we know the age we can consider what other questions are important about this persona. Key here is what this 28 year old man does for a living. Is he some sort of professional, is he in school, does he have a job, or is he unemployed. Building on our persona we find out that this man is a student.

An interesting part of building a persona is that there is no standard methodology, rather each question builds on the previous during the development of the persona. Now that we know the man is a student, our next question is what kind of student? Is this man in medical school, law school, business school, has he gone back to finish an undergraduate degree, or some other form of education? The answer to this question is that our man is a 2nd year MBA student at the University of Texas. The information up to this point has actually provided us far more insight to who he is than is apparent on the surface.

I think this would be a good time to take what we know and make some inferences about the general type of persona we are dealing with here. Firstly we know this persona will likely be working somewhere in the business world, and having a masters degree will likely put him in the higher levels of our income segmentation. This is important because we can assume this persona will have disposable income to spend on our product, if he likes it, and likely can recommend it to his friends and coworkers. Additionally we may be able to infer that he will likely be someone who does not have a lot of time both a as student and working professional and needs things to be convenient.

From here it would help to ask some more questions about our persona, is he married and if so does he have any children. This question may change some of our previous assumptions about his spending habits, but it is important to make those assumptions first then change them if necessary. It turns out that he is single and has no children. Now, knowing that he is single with no children we can infer that the personal time he does have, he has complete control over. So next it is important to know what he likes doing in that personal time. Does he spend it studying for classes, reading up on industry news, does he like to invest, and does he like sports or just being lazy and doing nothing? The way he spends his personal time is very telling about who this man is and how we can cater our product to him. Our persona is a moderate reader, outside of required reading he enjoys keeping up on the latest sports and political issues so he knows what going on in the world. Additionally when he has time he enjoys being active by playing sports or working out. He often runs because it is good for him, but does not enjoy it and looks at it more as a chore rather than a fun way to get exercise, so depending on our product we may be able to help him with his perception of this. Finally we can assume that this persona is fairly in touch with the latest in mainstream technology, we has a face book account and uses twitter both at home and on the go from his iPhone.

During the process of developing this persona we have asked some general but very informative questions which brought us to the final persona product. Our persona is a 28 year old Male MBA student. He is graduating soon and single, giving him a lot of personal time with full discretion of his disposable income. Since he is not married and has no kids he also does not own a house, he prefers to rent as it cuts down on the responsibility of maintaining a home.