Narrow Down Your Customer Personas With These Six Approaches

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You know you need personas. You know how to put them together, and you know how to interview. But the problem is your product has such a broad base of customers that there is no immediately obvious way to create a short list of five target personas, let alone one to start with.

This problem always comes up if you’re working on products for banks, multifaceted retail brands, government services and most large, established organizations.

Take a discount, national supermarket like Aldi for example. On the surface, Aldi’s personas are everyone. On the other hand, Aldi’s personas are very individual doctors, plumbers, nurses, executives, kids, grandparents, people that like to save, people that like special items, people living in the suburbs, people living in the city, the list goes on.

So, how do you solve this dilemma?

Most of the knowledge available will instruct you to develop a small number of personas, yet at the same time create personas that paint a focused, detailed picture. So if you follow this advice you’re stuck with either creating hundreds of personas that are specific, or creating personas that are too broad. Neither of these get you a set of personas you can make good decisions with.

There is an assumption made that you’re doing interviews, looking at analytics and performing other activities to get real, first-hand data about your customers before creating your personas.

Approaches for creating personas

1. A brute force approach means mapping out the hundreds of specific personas as well as the broad personas. From there, try to combine some and eliminate others. This is a viable approach, and in many ways a necessary one that helps you see if it’s possible to work your way through to a result. For example, you might find after going through 10–20 of the specific personas that common themes emerge that you can then transform into a single persona.
2. A jobs-to-be-done approach requires focusing on the jobs that your customers want to accomplish. After working through a handful of your personas, you may find that they are all looking to accomplish the same job. Knowing that, you can then build personas around the different decision criteria or requirements people bring to the job. Ultimately, you may end up defining your product with the jobs-to-be-done approach, with the personas as a secondary thought.
3. A decisions-based or events-based approach would be to look at the decisions or events that are common to your customer personas and working from there.
4. A prioritization approach means rank ordering, eliminating, and then focusing on certain personas. Ideally, you would either create or find a framework to apply to the way you are going to prioritize your personas. For example: You might prioritize based on a combination of persona pains multiplied by the size of that market segment. Consider a nurse and plumber use case (which aren’t meant to be the best examples of personas themselves, but rather a way to help describe this approach). A plumber’s pain costs $100 per week and there are 4,000 plumbers (plumbers = $100 * 4,000 = $400,000) so this persona is a higher priority than a nurse, whose pain is $10 per week and there are 8,000 nurses (nurses = $10*8,000 = $80,000).
5. A distribution channel approach to thinking about your personas would require you to start with the ways that a customer finds or accesses your product. Examples of distribution channels are search engines (SEO), a Facebook group, at the point-of-sale in a retailer, orthrough a reseller. In some instances the distribution channel is the single defining attribute of a persona that you can build secondary attributes or segments on top of.
6. An attitude approach uncovers a small number of personas. On the surface the attitude approach might not seem useful but with behavioral targeting and the ability to connect with people’s interests, this is a very legitimate way to view your personas.

Ultimately, if you’re dealing with a broad customer base, then you’re probably going to end up coming at your personas from multiple angles and approaches. You’ll head down a path, and then realize it can’t get you any further, so you will need to make changes.

Hopefully this gives you a little bit more structure or some alternate lenses to help narrow down your persona development.

Originally published at https://www.terem.com.au on October 16, 2019.