In a perfect world, personas are identified before design and marketing. By definition, a persona is a fictional person who represents a major user group for your target audience. The idea is to clearly know who you’re talking to so that you can deliver your message in a way that resonates with each persona.

The History

The concept of understanding customer segments as communities with coherent identity was developed in 1993-4 by Angus Jenkinson [1] [2] and internationally adopted by OgilvyOne with clients using the name CustomerPrints as “day-in-the-life archetype descriptions”.

Creating Persona’s

The more information the merrier, however, here are a few things you want to know about each persona

• Age and education
• Socioeconomic class and socioeconomic desires
• Life or career goals, fears, hopes, and attitudes
• Reasons for using the product
• Needs and expectations of the product
• Intellectual and physical skills that can be applied to the product
• Personal biases about the product or product space

Benefits

Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition.

• Personas put a face on the customer. Some persona programs give people names so you can refer to them and see them in a physical representation. The agency Organic creates persona rooms where their people live so the project team can become fully immersed.
• Personas remove the tendency to think of yourself as the customer. You have to step back and this gives you the structure to do so.
• Act as a guide throughout the process of developing marketing communications programs, cross mediums (print, digital, outdoor, TV, etc.).
• Keeps designers, Copywriters, programmers on track and avoids waste by remaining focused on the customer.

Steps to Create Persona’s

• 1. Find the Users
• 2. Build a Hypothesis
• 3. Verifications
• 4. Finding Patterns
• 5. Construct Them
• 6. Define Situations
• 7. Validation and buy-in
• 8. Dissemination of knowledge
• 9. Creating Scenarios
• 10. On-going Development