The Key to Creating Useful Customer Personas

“Liking your audience members is the first step in being genuine with them.”

The main point: Build on a foundation of empathy for your customers and you will be less likely to make biased or incorrect judgements

Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte, Inc., the largest design firm in Silicon Valley. She was ranked #1 on the world’s Top 30 communication professionals for 2017. In her best seller Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences, Duarte writes, “Your goal is to figure out what your audience cares about and link it to your idea.”

But first, as she points out, you have to ask good questions, and more than a few. “Study them. What would a walk in their shoes be like? What keeps them up at night? What are they called to do that will make a difference on this earth? Imagine their lives by the day, hour and minute.”

In Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models, authors and MIT grads Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann emphasize Duarte’s point. “To be wrong less when thinking about people, you must find ways to increase your empathy, opening up a deeper understanding of what other people are really thinking.”

Once you make your way through a season of asking good questions and gathering the necessary answers, you can build a family of customer personas. With these personas in hand, built on the foundation of empathy, you will be less likely to make biased or incorrect judgements.