Personas: How to get closer to your customer

Every company directs its services or products to a customer, because they ul­ti­mately accept the service and are willing to pay for it. However, too many providers only address a rough idea of the target group and perceive the customer only as part of a stat­ist­ic­al mass. This can lead to a situation in which no-one is really reached; in the end, the product remains as un­pro­filed as the target group’s idea; no-one really re­cog­nises the advantage of the offer.

Personas – fic­ti­tious users of a product or service whose char­ac­ter­ist­ics are derived from real data. In this way, pro­to­typ­ic­al customers are created that you can consult in every aspect: What does my persona want? How does my persona react? How do I reach my persona?

The idea of personas comes from the software developer Alan Cooper. Dis­sat­is­fied with the level of user-friend­li­ness offered by computers at that time (the 1980s), Cooper developed a concept in which the user is the focus of de­vel­op­ment. The basic idea still exists today: Instead of working with an abstract concept of a target group, a concrete prototype user is developed on the basis of in­ter­views and analyses.

A persona results from an intensive ex­am­in­a­tion of the target group. Although average values from broad analyses also find their way into persona design, the fic­ti­tious customer profile’s “life” is created through in­ter­views and con­ver­sa­tions with actual customers and in­ter­ested parties. The in­form­a­tion, which is gained through personal contact, allows it to develop into a realistic, effective persona.

A persona has a concrete profile with a realistic biography and in­di­vidu­al char­ac­ter­ist­ics. This allows you to get close to real customers without re­strict­ing yourself to in­di­vidu­al, random rep­res­ent­at­ives of the target group. Not only do in­di­vidu­al examples con­trib­ute to a persona, but also in­form­a­tion from a large database. Therefore, the persona is a mixture of an in­di­vidu­al and an average value.

Whenever customers are concerned, personas can help create excellent services. This begins with the actual offer. Whether it’s a service or product, online or offline, digital or on demand, analogue or tangible: the wishes and re­quire­ments of the customer should always be in the fore­ground when tailoring an offer. However, there are even more contact points for buyers, sub­scribers and users. Personas can help, for example, when it comes to support or marketing.

In order to make clear what the purpose of a persona is, more specific terms sometimes appear: User persona, customer persona, buyer persona – these all have a certain focus, but the principle remains the same.

If personas are used in a company, re­gard­less of the area, the work can be aligned much closer to the customer. This in turn has further positive effects:

• Il­lus­tra­tion of different per­spect­ives: The customer base is not a ho­mo­gen­ous mass. With different personas, you are creating not only a non-existent average person, but also different in­di­vidu­als with different needs.
• Focus on the user: Products and services must also benefit the customer. It therefore makes sense to keep these in mind – and not make decisions based solely on stat­ist­ics.
• Ques­tion­ing use­ful­ness: When working with personas, one contrasts the fic­ti­tious character’s goals with the product’s use­ful­ness. Once the offer is sat­is­fy­ing the customers’ wishes, the product can be called suc­cess­ful.
• Visu­al­ising users: Personas are not just virtual concepts. In most cases, the personas’ bio­graph­ies and profiles are visu­al­ised on cards or posters. This helps them remain tangible at all times.

A persona doesn’t just consist of a few key points. If you decide to create one, or better: several, you are building a complete character. This process is not dis­sim­il­ar to writer’s work: You have to think of the personas’ name age, pro­fes­sion, etc. Re­l­at­ively detailed bio­graph­ies are the result. However, in com­par­is­on to the writer, the persona designer has clearer limits to their cre­ativ­ity. If you design a persona, it should always be based on concrete data. Otherwise, creating a persona is an exercise in cre­ativ­ity, but brings little to nothing concrete to the company.

If you want to develop a persona, first you need to conduct in­ter­views, evaluate surveys and collect data. On this basis, you build different char­ac­ters that reflect the diversity of your clientele. A persona is therefore – most im­port­antly – not just an average person. Just as your customers are not all the same, the different personas must not be the same. The persona therefore not only contains facts, but also conveys wishes, mo­tiv­a­tions and attitudes – just like a real person.

In order for a persona to be as tangible and useful as possible, certain basic in­form­a­tion should be included in each profile:

• Name
• Gender
• Age
• Pro­fes­sion
• Residence
• Family back­ground

These clear bio­graph­ic­al facts can be sup­ple­men­ted well with a photo – e.g. from a stock photo provider. Il­lus­tra­tions are also popular. This gives you a small profile. However, this in­form­a­tion is not enough, which is why you can add back­ground in­form­a­tion to a personas’ profile:

• Hobbies: How does the persona spend their free time?
• Values: What is important to the persona in life?
• Life goals: What does the person want to achieve?
• Online life: On which networks and websites does the persona spend time?
• Re­stric­tions: How is the persona re­stric­ted?
• Knowledge: What knowledge about the tech­no­logy of the product does the persona have?
• Ex­pect­a­tions: What does the persona want from the product?

In practice, it has proved suc­cess­ful to combine a profile with longer con­tinu­ous text. You can only get a feeling for the character if you formulate a story around the persona, which will help you decipher the re­quire­ments of the product. The keyword profile, on the other hand, makes it easy to deal with the fic­ti­tious biography. Therefore, a persona almost becomes an in­ter­locutor in the de­vel­op­ment of ideas and in the design of strategies, products or designs. Do you keep asking yourself: What would be the best solution? Then simply find the answer yourself.

As a rule of thumb, one always assumes three personas, but the perfect number always depends on your offer. The more complex a product or service, the more personas there are. However, one should not ex­ag­ger­ate it under any cir­cum­stances, because too many personas provide for excessive demands, since you cannot fairly take all the numerous in­di­vidu­al interests into account in the end. Therefore, you should develop and use (par­tic­u­larly with limited resources) just a few personas to begin with, in order to increase them gradually.

Some companies even go so far as to develop personas that do not belong to the target group. These serve as an­ti­theses to the actual persona. This can help you to sharpen your product profile even more.

In the following, we present an exemplary persona. As a back­ground, we are using a fashion company that wants to design an online shop. In order to find out what the target group likes, the company conducts numerous in­ter­views.

Persona: Safety-conscious with an affinity for tech­no­logy

Name: Sandra Smith

Gender: Female

Age: 30 years old

Family situation: Married, one child

Pro­fes­sion: Su­per­mar­ket manager

Address: Doncaster, Yorkshire

Quote: “Safety first!”

Goals & Values: Sandra is con­stantly striving to create stability for herself and her family no matter what the situation. This starts with healthy food and ends with a building savings contract. However, this doesn’t mean that Sandra is boring: She’s in­ter­ested in new trends and fashion, but she doesn’t take them too seriously. She will only spend money on a luxury item if she is really convinced of the product.

Technical knowledge & online life: Sandra grew up in the digital age and spends a lot of time online every day in her free time and at work. In her pro­fes­sion­al life, the use of computers is a matter of course for her. Although she does use social networks, she is reluctant to do so, and does not reveal much about herself through these channels. Sandra is secretive of her personal in­form­a­tion as a result of data theft.

Hobbies & freetime: Sandra is very family-oriented. Therefore, she spends most of her free time with her husband and child. This includes planning everyday life. The role of branch manager also applies to her home life. She likes nature and plays sports once a week. On other days, she tries to go jogging. Every two weeks or so, she meets with her girl­friends to have some drinks or go for dinner.

Product ex­pect­a­tions: Sandra enjoys shopping on the internet because she has the op­por­tun­ity to buy brands and designs online that are not available to her in her place of residence. She also saves time by buying online. However, because she is familiar with tech­no­logy, she knows about the dangers that can arise when ordering over the internet. That’s why she makes sure that the process runs safely and smoothly, that no error messages occur and that mech­an­isms known to her are used. If a problem occurs during the purchase, she won’t take any risks and would rather cancel the order com­pletely.