Personas are commonly used by leading product and service companies primarily for design and promotion (or messaging) efforts. Since its first use of personas back in 2002, Inovo has worked to extend and develop persona methodology in two ways:

• The application of persona methodology to the entire product lifecycle from the earliest front-end activities as a means to understand unmet needs and desires, through the product design and development process and into the messaging, promotion and branding activities.
• The creation of a more structured persona definition that can be used not only for the ‘discussions around the table’ that narrative persona definitions provide, but can also be used for directly testing new concepts in software.

In order to accomplish these objectives, Inovo has developed the Persona Adoption Modelä (PAM) that extends, enhances and quantifies the traditional narrative persona methodology. Inovo’s PAM can be applied in a variety of situations that require gaining insight into how people are likely to act or behave:

• Creating innovative products
• Identifying new opportunities
• Understanding customer perceptions
• Creating compelling design
• Messaging, promotion, attention, and ‘findability’

In each of these cases, it is the objective of the PAM to determine how people respond to a specific solution concept that they encounter or hear about. The solution concept can be anything from a new product or service to a new promotional campaign or web site design. Perceptions are formed, and responses elicited, by an individual’s interaction with a solution concept. In the PAM, a solution concept has a specific profile of effects (that which is an outcome of the solution). An individual’s needs and desires (rational and emotional) are represented by a Persona’s Experience and Outcome profiles. The interaction of a Persona with a Solution in the PAM yields a Response.


The Persona model captures all of the relevant reactions and behaviors of a community in a way that can be used to test out virtually any solution concept (or idea). The personas are represented in the model by their outcome and experience profile and the solutions concepts being tested are represented by an effects profile. Any number of solutions can be tested against the set of personas to see the varying reactions. In this way, an early indicator of which solution concepts are attractive (and which are not) can be formed.