Personas is the more fashionable term for “segment profiles,” which is now deemed as boring and old. The term “personas” became in vogue as sales and marketing teams tried to customize their customer communications. It now refers to customer groups in general, even if no segmentation research has been conducted to classify customers.
In some organizations, these customer profiles are just a reflection of who internal stakeholders believe their customers are and what they do. This is a bad practice because the personas are based mostly on anecdotal evidence and personal opinions, rather than actual research.
Personas are no more than very concrete segment profiles and should be based on segmentation analysis that goes beyond behavioral data. They may include demographics, psychographics, and category-specific behavior descriptors. When we do market segmentation based on needs, attitudes, and behaviors, segment profiles are part of the deliverables. Depending on the type of data we have about the segments, they can be general or very specific profiles that can be converted into personas.
In personas research, particularly for customer journey mapping and user research purposes, we go deeper into the “why” people in the segments “do what they do” to get a more vivid and human representation of the segments. They become portraits of segments. In short, the most specific data we have about motivations and how the segments may use products and services, the better information we have to create personas.
What is the main reason to conduct this type of research? Because you are not the user. If you are a user of your own products, you probably represent a very small and biased segment of your customer base. You are invested in the company like no user will ever be.
To create products and services that are useful, usable and appealing to customers, you have to understand who your customers are and what they need. Otherwise, you will end up creating products and services for yourself, your friends and family. Worst of all, you could be just copying your competitors without knowing it.
To develop personas, we use both qualitative and quantitative research whenever possible given timeline and budget constraints.
It’s also important to get key stakeholders involved in the research process to facilitate the implementation of the results. This is why we always recommend starting personas research with meetings or interviews with key stakeholder groups.
There are essentially two main approaches to personas research:
Relevant Insights can recruit qualified 2C and B2B participants through our sample provider partners for both qualitative and quantitative research. Relevant Insights can also recruit participants from your customer database and will implement procedures to protect any identifiable personal information.
As an alternative, you may also recruit directly from your own customer database if data privacy restrictions don’t allow for customer data sharing. In these cases, we will provide the necessary data collection tools or work with your data collection tools (i.e., survey tools) if the data is required to stay in the account.
After discussions with you, we determine the sample parameters and assist in developing screeners. We also manage participant incentives.
The analysis in personas research is centered around finding unique patterns to develop the personas profiles.
In large-scale segmentation analysis based on quantitative research, we develop a predictive algorithm to identify personas/segments in future research you might do. Different multivariate statistical and trade-off techniques are used to identify the segments, including:
Six to eight weeks for qualitative research or quantitative research.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.