Please! Destroy your persona!
Stop dehumanizing your customer
What do you see on the other side of your screen? Do you see the World Wide Web? Do you see the invisible masses? Do you see a target audience? Are you looking at a persona? Or do you see one lonely human? Trying desperately to make sense of your content?
Personally… I focus on one lonely human.
What does this human look like? I don’t know. He could be male. She could be female. She could be old. He could be young.
All I know is there is only one. And that one person needs my help.
My copy and content are always focused on helping that one person.
Because that is the reality of our online world. One person, behind one screen trying to get shit done. Trying to do their task. With as little friction as possible.
I have spent a large part of my professional career sitting in rooms with companies trying to form some kind of image of the person on the other side of the screen.
And I can tell – after 15 years – your target audience does not exist.
Your persona does not exist.
Your many assumptions about your customer are… wrong.
Because as soon as you take one tiny little step away from the fact that there is a real, breathing, idiosyncratic human on the other side, you start dehumanizing.
There is a real, breathing, idiosyncratic human on the other side.
Any classification of that one human is dehumanizing. It is an assumption and a generalization. And that is exactly the space where we feel free to bore them with jargon, marketing and brochure speak and endless pages of unintelligible nonsense.
Face the fact that making a persona – the highest we can ask of companies at this moment in time – is just taking general assumptions about a large part of your target audience and painting a pretty picture. Sure the picture helps visualize somebody on the other side. Which is a huge step forward.
But do not ever mistake it for humanizing your content.
You will never capture all those little quirks of the person on the other side, so don’t bother. Give up the puppet show. Don’t make persona’s. Don’t make target audiences. Don’t think the world is out there and you can carve them into neat little segmented pieces.
Focus on one single human.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
Do you want to help that one person?
Do you want to make their life easier?
Speak in clear and easy to understand terms.
Make the process painless. Make the process frictionless. Make the process the easiest one the person on the other side has ever seen. Focus on one human at a time and the masses will come.