The persona and the person behind it
Why do some brands resonate so powerfully with their customers? Is it a result of pure creative genius or a relentless pursuit of understanding who their customers truly are?
As I was about to publish this, I stumbled upon a book on Marilyn Monroe’s poetry that put everything into perspective about personas and the real people behind them.
The bubbly, blonde, out-of-this-world sex symbol that we know so well, with every gesture, every move, every heartbreak, was actually a caricature of the real woman.
Monroe read Ulysses — all of it. She left a library of 400 books. When she wasn’t shooting films, she took night classes in literature and history at UCLA. The book of her private poetry reveals a complex, sensitive soul who peered deeply into her own psyche and thought intensely about both the world and other people. Her private notebooks reveal the sad disconnect between a highly visible public persona and a highly vulnerable private person, misunderstood by the world and longing to be truly seen.
Understanding the real person should be at the core of why we build personas (user or customer descriptions commonly used in UX and CX communities).
Even though I think the word “persona” falls short of such a holistic description of a customer, I will not propose to change it, since it’s harder to unlearn an accepted concept than relearn a new one.
Instead, I will try to articulate why — if we want to create compelling work — we must take on all the complexities of being human, rather than settle for generalizations and clichés.
The Latin word “persona” is defined as the social face an individual presents to the world — a mask, if you will — which is designed to make a definite impression upon others while concealing the true nature of the individual. In other words, it’s the role we choose to play.
But there’s a problem: The persona is a mask–not the true self and not the whole person.
The real self, under the mask, is afraid to go out because from an evolutionary perspective, it’s more important to adapt to social norms than to completely be yourself.
C. G. Jung said, “One could say, with little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.”
The aim of individuation (or-self development), according to Jung, is to adapt the “mask” of the persona to the true nature of the self. Achieving balance between the persona and the self brings real happiness and a sense of inner peace to the individual.
The way personas have been used
In advertising…
After the industrial revolution, the idea of brand building gained importance, as branding was the only way to differentiate otherwise similar products. Later, brands created so much social power that they turned into persona badges: “I’m this kind of person, therefore I use this brand.”
Advertising was, for many years, directed at personas and eventually fell into the trap of over-exaggeration, turning brands and products into a manifestation of the tired clichés of the industry. These caricatures eventually became something completely alien to the true self, making them a poor foundation for the process of building great products, services or brands.
Examples of common persona caricatures that are still in existence today:
o A professor becomes nothing but his round glasses, corduroy jacket and textbooks
o Dieting is all about success, measuring tapes, scales, and women happily eating apples
o A city brand is merely a medley of its attractions and sights
As consumers built strong defenses against the superficial messages of brands, those brands started to lose their powers of persuasion.
In UX design…
In 1995, Alan Cooper used user-centered profiling for his enterprise clients. They were mostly companies with no interest in the target audience. His first techniques involved using the needs, motivations, and usage habits of a heavy product user as the foundation for the design of an entire system. The results were so overwhelmingly positive that he decoded his personal way of working into the marketing tool known as a persona.
The concept of using a specific, (as opposed to generalized), profile has had a huge effect across branding and communication.
A brave new way of looking at consumers: Reaching to the person beyond the persona
Some brands have been brave enough to attempt to ease the tension Jung described between the mask of the persona and the true self. They have begun addressing social tensions created by social conformity and the personas that blindly follow them. This process not only creates effective communication, but can also inspire admiration and even trigger social change and public debate.
Examples? Here are a few…
1. Dove: Imagine a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety
The Dove brand’s global study, The Real Truth About Beauty, created the Real Beauty campaign in 2004. The campaign ignited a global conversation about the need for a wider definition of beauty because the existing one had become limiting and unattainable.
The clichéd persona forced upon us by the fashion and beauty industry — with its images of thin, tall, impossibly beautiful women — demanded that every woman look the same. But the true self, the person behind the persona, knows that benchmark is unattainable. It creates a rift, anxiety between the self and the persona, a territory that Dove now owns.
2. Citibank Live Richly: Disrupted banking clichés
For the first time, a big global bank dared to talk in a non-bank-like way, using headlines such as “He who dies with the most toys is still dead” and “The best table in the city is the one with your family around it.”
What do you think? Does this campaign try to polish the mask, or deliver positive wisdom to the person hiding anxiously behind the persona?
3. Harley Davidson: Educated outlaw
Harley Davidson built their entire brand to appeal to a wider urban target audience on one customer insight, which also serves as the bridge between the persona and the self: the educated outlaw.
The brand manifests a person’s desires and his rebellion to the persona he must hide behind. His mask of social conformity is his career, his family and his status. But when he mounts his Harley, he becomes his deepest desire- the outlaw that elicits shivers of fear from those he passes by.
If an experience architect were to build a product for Harley Davidson, the development team would need very few discussions and have even fewer frictions deciding for whom they are building.
Mind the gap
The persona tool has to evolve from the mask into a more hybrid area that seeks to bridge this gap. This is not to suggest that Alan-Cooper-style, persona-led UX projects do not create positive usability results. They do. But a standard persona does not necessarily carry the true human insights for great branding and communication.
When you consider disruptive and successful businesses like Airbnb, Etsy, Mint, or Spotify, you can see many features that talk to the person behind the persona.
Using personas as a tool should guide strategic decisions about the product/brand’s focus, but also enable broader storytelling and better tactical-level design decisions. It should also help the team make the inevitable design trade-offs.
When building experiences and interactive products where the consumer’s emotional experience is just as important as the product’s functionality, personas must do two things: Serve as a starting point and guide your team across any and all developments. New CX agencies should make the persona tool go deeper than the mask to find the human insights underneath.
With CX, the former focus on just users now extends to potential costumers. The obsession with conversion funnels has been replaced by holistic views on customer experience, including how customers might prefer your brand to another. Functional specs must now incorporate the emotional and irrational aspects of decision making. That definitely requires an insight into the bridge between the persona and the person behind it.
Moving from standard personas to “persona and the person behind”
The process of building personas is similar to the process novelists and screenwriters undertake to ensure characters are interesting, dialogues are real, and that the plot creates high levels of reader/viewer engagement. It demands judgment, intuition, and relentless curiosity about people.
Building personas that aim to go beyond the mask and bring out the person behind it, calls for a multidimensional method:
- Describing their rational and emotional needs side by side. Try to see the world through their eyes and reflect on what makes them happy and what creates anxiety in their lives.
- Look at the social tensions. What keeps our customers awake at night? These tensions might not even be related to our category, but might hint at important findings that lead to a great overarching product or service story. Standard UX personas cannot do that.
- In addition to biographic, psychographic and webographic profiling, focus on specific goals, needs, and attitudes of the users and their knowledge proficiency about the category.
- Also, focus on sensory, immersive and emotional characteristics of usage. This is something that is often overlooked in traditional persona building. The aesthetics and sensory qualities of the experience help reach KPI’S such as emotional appeal and engagement.
- Look at the context, interaction and information characteristics of usage because they are extremely useful in guiding tactical-level design and help us build a road map of how to present appropriate content.
Building for an established brand brings the unique challenge of integrating the brand DNA into the product and experience, especially if it’s well rooted in consumers’ minds. That’s why you must look to the brand story to see how your product or service can be a new chapter in the meta story.
When given the opportunity to build a new brand from scratch, the persona’s sensory, immersive and emotional characteristics are essential in building a new brand narrative that will resonate with the self and also have the power to live beyond the product.
Personas will be more valuable in the future of brand experience building when they truly reveal the tension between the mask and the self, or in other words between the persona and the person behind it.
New experiences can easily springboard from these rich personas.
This is what human-centered thinking should be all about. This is what we specialize in at Hello Great Works.
