What is a Persona ?
A Persona is the typical profile of your ideal customer.
A Persona is an archetype representing a group of people with similar behaviors, motivations and goals. Personas are used in Design1, Ergonomics, Marketing, IT, etc. to enable the designer(s) to determine what the product or service needs to do and how it should work.
Origin of Persona ?
The Personas method was created by Alan Cooper. It is presented in the book ” The inmates are running the asylum: [Why high-tech products drive us crazy and how to restore the sanity] ” published in 1999.
What’s the point of creating Personae ?
- Creating your Personasinvolves defining very precisely the needs, issues and questions that your potential customers have throughout the buying process.
- Creating your Personas enables you to identify all the communication opportunities you can seize to generate leads and convert them into customers.
- Creating your Personas also enables you to better understand your target’s buying behavior.
- It’s essential to create your personas before defining and
implement a web strategy that will enable you to generate leads and convert them into customers
The buyer, overwhelmed by information, expects you to deliver a unique experience and ultra-personalized communications. If you don’t know it inside out, it’s clearly mission impossible! - If you invest in marketing actions without taking the time to draw up your personas, you’re betting everything on your assumptions, and that’s very dangerous.
We regularly come across companies who have ignored this work, or who have created a Persona sheet in a few minutes on the corner of a table.
- Behind this, they invest time and money in content creation, tools and social network communication, assuming it’s the right thing to do.
- Unfortunately, if their prospects don’t have the behaviors or expectations assumed, that money goes up in smoke.
- Before investing, you need to validate each of your hypotheses, and this inevitably involves creating Persona files.
What information required to create a Personae ?
When you make a Persona, there are two types of information to collect: demographic characteristics and behavioral characteristics.
For demographic information, you need to determine, for example, what your Persona’s job is, what their typical day is, what their key skills are, or what tools they use.
Two other essential points here: what are your Persona’s objectives and what are the problems they face?
Here, we need to define the questions your Persona asks and the content he consults throughout the buying process. The way in which it obtains information is also an important point.
Behavioral information will actually help you define what a mature prospect is.
How to create a Personae ?
- Search
- Interview (exploratory, semi-structured).
- Direct observation (in situation).
- Focus group.
- Online questionnaire (qualitative, quantitative).
- State of the art (book, publication, web article).
- Sector analysis.
- The market, but also by interviewing all in-house staff involved in the subject (sales, designers, technicians).
- Analysis
- Identification of behavioral variables.
- Distribution of participants on scales.
- Identify similar behavioral patterns.
- Data synthesis.
- Modeling
- Creation of basic data (first name, age, profession, etc.).
- Choice of a representative photograph.
- Write a story to illustrate goals and behaviors.
Personae and social consensus ?
Nevertheless, as a tool designed to build consensus within project teams, it will be advisable to integrate elements of organizational knowledge (market research, consumer segmentations, managers’ intuitions, etc.) in order to produce an acceptable synthesis. Purely “ethnographic” work runs the risk of being too dissonant with what the organization thinks it knows about its market, which would limit its appropriation. This synthesis work must be collective and involve future users of the tool, thus increasing its acceptability within the team.
Analysis of a Personae ?
Whatever methods are implemented, they must enable us to understand who the product’s users are, in what situations they use the product (context and environment), what their goals are, what their behaviors are (tasks and actions), what their beliefs and values are, what their expertise is, what obstacles have been identified, what needs to be avoided, and so on.
The focus will be on reference situations where products and services are (or are likely to be) manipulated, in order to mix elements of psychology (behavior, analysis in terms of goals and means) and micro-sociology (activity, social relations, analysis in terms of tactics and strategy).
Step 1 – Identifying behavioral variables
Having collected data during the research phase, the first stage of analysis consists of identifying and listing the various user behaviors. This identification must be based on an inductive approach. In other words, these structuring dimensions emerge as the analysis progresses, but they are not presupposed.
Cooper (2004), for example, suggests focusing on these five types of variable2 :
- Activities – What the user does, how often and in what volume.
- Attitudes – What the user thinks about the product domain.
- Aptitudes – What training the user has and his or her ability to learn.
- Motivation – Why the user is committed to the product.
Step 2 – Assigning participants to scales
Having identified the behavioral and situational variables, the project team then allocates the interviewed or observed participants to scales representing the different variables.
Depending on the objectives, these scales can take different forms, and can be supported by a quantitative study or even a typology.
More expeditiouslythe Methodology Persona can also be the following …
1. identify user “families”; each will give rise to 1 Persona (5 max per project)
2 Collect data : age, gender, CSP, objectives, basic needs, obstacles encountered, desires, feelings, character traits, values, etc.
Interviewer representatives of each family (user surveys), and/or internally those who know them best (salespeople, customer service, etc.) and
Think about
verbatims
!
1 Create a Persona file Give it a name, age, place of residence, profession, hobbies, character traits and… make it real with a photo!
2) Draw conclusions: what content strategy should be put in place to satisfy and seduce them?