Customer Persona Development by Travis K
Persona (Per-so-na) -n
A fictional character created to represent a particular market segment
Inspiring designers or developers to create new products and services can be challenging. Frequently I find “new ideas” are really just reinventing existing ones. An example of this is I routinely meet with clients that think they have the next “Facebook”, in actuality they just have “Facebook” with a minor twist or spin. Who whats to be a member of Facepage?!?!
Most companies have in-depth demographic & physcographic information on their target customers. This information is useful but has the opportunity to be a much more effective tool for inspiring new products or services. Developing personas that show the day in the life of target customers can be instrumental in hatching new ideas.
Charts, graphs, PowerPoint presentations & spreadsheets are a difficult way to really promote forward thinking. Imagine how bringing the content found in the previous mentioned mediums to life through video or an interactive web site interface can be. Those charts, graphs, PowerPoint presentations & spreadsheets can become a living breathing inspirational tool for your designers & developers. Through these living breathing personas you’ll see real opportunities to fill needs.
Of course if you don’t yet have good research and data on your target customers there are great resources such as SonicRim out of Columbus OH & San Francisco, CA or Hartman Group out of Seattle, WA.
Bullseye Creative has taken mountains of research and demographic data to created engaging, entertaining & truly effective personas for your company to better understand its target consumers. Mediums for this work has included video, web & print.
Five Keys to Success:
1. Focus on relevant data
2. Don’t just utilize the persona in product or service development…also use it as a foundation for the marketing
3. Focus on the facts found in the data not what your think you’ve always know about your target customer (You may be surprised how limiting your pre-existing thoughts are)
4. Include scenarios in the research & persona development
5. Make personas believable but also entertaining
Additional Resource:
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28marketing%29
Note: Due to the private nature of personas, Bullseye Creative is not providing specific examples.
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Filed under For The Blog. Tagged creative process, persona development, product delevopment, service development, target customer
3 Responses
Good post, Travis. So many companies invest large budgets into researching their target consumers. Then, when the results of this research is placed in the hands of the people who actually use it (the engineers, planners, marketers, developers, etc) they mostly ignore all of the data. Who wants to read 300 pages of spreadsheets? Not me. That’s why this research data is so much more effective when it is “brought to life” through the persona development work of Bullseye Creative.
A company’s target customer is so much more memorable when fully formed into a relatable embodiment of otherwise “boring data.”
Another medium idea for Bullseye might be social media applications. It would be effective to give these personas a life of their own online with fully-engaging back-stories and social interactions. It’s as important to know how your customers interact with each other as it is to know how they interact with your products or services.
I really like when people are expressing their opinion and thought. So I like the way you are writing
Do you have copy writer for so good articles? If so please give me contacts, because this really rocks! :)