The study of consumer behavior is a time-tested tool of marketing, but for new offerings and changing markets, behavior alone is a poor predictor of future adoption. To understand why one offering is successful and another fails we must also understand why people behave the way that they do. The motivation behind people’s behavior includes both rational and emotional elements – which are often unknown even to the individual and may not be tied to measurable quantities like demographics and purchase behavior. It is important to be able to discover, document, synthesize, and analyze people’s rational and emotional behaviors to predict their responses to specific offerings. Personas let you do this in a highly effective, straight-forward manner.

The reason that personas are so useful is that they provide a rich means to create a deep understanding of, and empathy for, customers, future customers, and other stakeholders. By using personas, not only do the possible actions and behaviors of customers become clearer, but the reasons for these actions and behaviors can be understood and used to create better customer experiences.

History

The concept of a persona was introduced in 1999 by Alan Cooper in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Cooper set out to tackle a problem that plagued designers and engineers as they were creating new products. He was specifically interested in software products that failed to connect with users because of too many features or being hard to use – that is, products that ended up being ‘user hostile’ rather than ‘user friendly.’

In the time since Cooper introduced the concept, persona-based research has been adopted by corporations around the world. Personas are rapidly becoming the best practice in the design and marketing communities. The persona approach solves many of the difficulties companies find in understanding the essence of the customers they are trying to serve, especially the customer experience – the part which is not necessarily rational or logical but more emotional in nature.

What Is a Persona?

Personas are archetypal profiles that represent the needs and desires of distinct categories of users – categories based on motives and reasoning, not on behavior. Personas act as a stand-in for real users and help inform decisions about the users’ relationships with products and services and everything that affects or is affected by an offering.

The persona description resembles classical target customer profiles, but with some important distinctions. It is not a description of a real, single user or of an average user - the persona represents the users who share similar motivations for their behavior. It includes goals and motives, described in a fictional account that contains details that make the persona more “tangible and alive” for the people who will be using it. There are typically several personas that represent the categories of users in a particular context or research domain.

The following is an example of a narrative persona description taken from Elaine Brechin’s article on Reconciling Market Segments with Personas.



In this description, you can see how a persona is described as a user archetype that can be used to help guide decisions about an offering or activity that is relevant to this persona. By understanding the archetype – whose goals, needs and desires, and behavior patterns are well understood – you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.

Personas allow you to translate articulated but unstructured needs and desires into actionable models of customer thinking and, consequently, behavior. Personas are categories that group people by how they think and choose – rather than by their surface characteristics or organizational roles. The persona represents the underlying causes of demand that drives adoption.

Personas capture the important characteristics and suppress the aspects that are not important. Persona descriptions often look like caricatures, focusing on specific aspects of the group and ignoring others. Unlike a target customer description, a persona is not a complete person. It is not used to predict behavior in every context, just in the domain from which it was created.

New Uses of Personas

In the years since Cooper introduced the persona methodology, it has become increasingly popular with both those designing new products and services as well as those charged with promoting them. Recently, the use of Personas has been extended the front end where the objective is creating a new, innovative product or service concept. In addition, personas are being used to assess virtually any activity or attribute related to a specific offering. Everything from ‘will this new heated cup holder be a hit’ to ‘how effective will my new ad campaign be’ to ‘how do my customers form their perceptions of my brand’ can be addressed through the proper use of the persona methodology.

This new use of personas is described in the Persona Adoption Model section of the Wiki.