Persona reporting is a highly effective way to communicate segmentation and other target market analytics to people who don’t read math comfortably. It's also a perception tool.
In persona reporting, each segment or other division of the market is given a short description, very similar to the character descriptions in a stage play or a TV “series bible.” It covers the habits, tastes, beliefs, experiences, and shared background of members of the group. Sometimes it actually assigns a name to an imaginary archetypal member of the group. Prizm segmentation and most of its competitors are persona-reported. Names like Kids and Blue Blood Estates make it very easy to imagine a particular customer.
When I looked at the customers of Jamba Juice for an investor group, the six personas I reported almost certainly were given more attention than all the graphs and tables emerging from the text analysis.
I’ve always recommended persona reporting, because it communicates so clearly, and it beautifully focuses business leadership’s attention during the strategic and planning phase. But it’s also a powerful insight generator.
On one consulting gig, I discovered a persona among the client’s employees -- essentially young, female, artsy hipsters with “craptastic survival” (their terminology) retail jobs in the client’s outlets. The employee discount on the client’s products turned out to be a major attraction to them, because of their passion for style on a budget. These employees, much more than the others, enthusiastically supported and promoted the products to their friends. When products were created and enhanced with that particular persona in mind, they turned into red-hot hits, with the excellent employees joyfully seizing and running with them. (I still use that gig in little sermons about the importance of always plotting residuals.)
When I was editing a small city magazine and doing some marketing research on the side, I did advertiser depth interviews that revealed the advertisers wanted the editorial side to attract three personas:
- Dr. A: Newly affluent 30-ish men from professional schools who were eager to raise the class of their possessions.
- The Bs: Nouveau riche couples ages 25-40 who were interested in high-priced nightlife events.
- Ms. C: Fashionistas ages 25-30 who were interested in clothes, hair, and clubbing.
Communicating these findings to the editorial bullpen, we discovered that no one wanted to write for Dr. A or the Bs, and it was hard to find staff willing to write the product and restaurant reviews those personas wanted. More of our writers liked to write for the Ms. Cs, but reader studies showed Ms. C mostly looked at pictures and rarely read text. As a result, the magazine beefed up its photo features, chopped editorial to a minimum (in a bit of irony, it laid off me and the editor who commissioned the study), focused tightly on local shopping and celeb parties, and did much better.
In some ways, the most interesting thing I’ve seen happen with persona reporting was a time when it failed. I was trying to prepare a marketing report for a professional group that wanted to know why it got so little repeat or referral business. (When you’re only selling cold calls, it’s a tough row to hoe.) Sadly, my client’s personnel couldn’t supply anyobservations about past customers, except that they had money. Further investigation revealed that my client’s core reports and products were being tried out mostly by old cronies, who were just throwing the client some business as a favor. The persona, in other words, was “people who have spare money and feel sorry for us.”
In those three different cases, persona reporting revealed:
- An unexploited market on which the business could focus a new effort
- A fundamental disjunction for resolution and restructuring
- There was no real market.
I recommend persona reporting highly. It’s not easy to research, develop, and write, but my experience is that it’s extraordinarily worthwhile.
— John Barnes 
is a marketing intelligence analyst pioneering the commercial application of statistical semiotics. He is also the freelance author of 29 published novels and hundreds of articles and short stories.The CMO Site is an executive social network that provides CMOs and other marketing executives from the world’s leading organizations with a real-time, online venue where they can convene to discuss how they're delivering on the most critical marketing priorities. Join us!
No comments:
Post a Comment