As we hurtle onwards, marketers are using more sophisticated ways to close the gap between where the customer wants to go and where we would like to encourage them to go.

One increasingly vital cornerstone of placing the customer in the centre of marketer’s thinking, is creating tightly defined ‘personas’. These are realistic, often extensive and detailed visualised descriptions of an individual, built to be the representative of the key target(s) for the marketer. For it is true that only by truly knowing one’s target – as living, breathing people (rather than just statistics) – can one effectively have the insight to create and deliver differentiated brand relationships.

What I’ve noticed in my travels through client libraries, though, is that many personas have been created in a pretty lazy, unenquiring and uninspiring way. They describe the backgrounds, personalities, interests and drivers in a positive angle, but seldom look deeper to identify and define the fears and anxieties – the deficits. For surely it is by looking deeper at the stuff that is not so obvious, that a marketer can mine the insights required to achieve a real difference.

Why is this so? Why the seeming lack of rigour? Many reasons, but one is clearly the way that some personas are developed – relying too much on self-reported data in their creation. In other words, there are flaws when we take at face value what the customer tells us about what they are like, what they do, how they feel, what drives them, etc. This is because people are their own most unreliable witnesses. Left unchallenged, their self-perceptions are not accurate of the reality.

A great example* is the “overweight” woman who is drawn by artists.  She said “then I had a chance to look at the pictures the group had drawn. They saw me so differently from how I pictured myself. I thought they would have drawn me a lot bigger and it made me realise how wrong I was.”

So how do we develop better persona?

1. Use proper in-depth qualitative research conducted by people who understand psychology.
2. Do not rely just on what is told to you – but how it is told. Body language and inflection are intensely revealing
3. Look at the context – the home, the office, the car, the family pictures
4. Look at not only what is, but what lies behind – explore the evidence you see and hear and probe their perceptions of their life, the tensions, the hopes, the fears, the threats. For example, explore their life stage – especially how different life is now compared to how it was before they had children or before they retired, etc.
5. Explore wishfulness; explore how life should be, in their eyes

At BrandHook, we recently completed an exercise that painted a detailed persona. The persona was created in part through the exploration of the tensions that some mums feel when they realise that they live most of their life through the prism of motherhood and find themselves losing sight of the woman within. The findings opened up a rich new strata of opportunity for our client.

By following these steps anyone can reveal a rich dimension of opportunity for the marketer and for their client, and helps to keep your target audience humanised in the process.

* BBC News Magazine 2/6/16 “I had to leave my partner to lose weight”

Written by Tim