Personas and persona development can be a contentious topic within any business. Some people love them, others really don’t.
But – imho – it’s hard to knock the idea of having a clear, grounded and insight-derived set of customer personas operating within your organisation. Those flimsy, made up woolly ones? Yes, we can ditch those right away.
Personas are a really effective way for your colleagues and stakeholders to not only ‘get’ who customers are, but to encourage them to think about customers when they’re making decisions. Yes, this might be big fundamental, strategic direction decisions but can also be small, seemingly incidental ones.
Personas keep the customer top of mind in your organisation. Now, who’s going to argue against that?
We worked with a client who found that a lack of high-quality personas was blocking their pathway to significant growth. Why? Because personas needed to feed into a number of areas into the business to release the cogs and gears and get things moving towards growth.
So the ‘persona development project’ very quickly became top priority. Its successful completion would 𝘂𝗻𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗸 the rest of the business to focus on high growth.
🗺️ Strategy team
- Their work was dependent on ‘who’ the customer is
🪩 Brand & marketing team
- How could they develop a brand and deploy marketing activity without proper customer insight?
😁 Sales team
- Selling would be far less effective without a really good understanding of the target audience
But how could they get this project done to the high standard it needed?
They were stuck. Their immediate options for developing the personas each carried limitations:
– AI / LLM tools –
Quick and easy but likely return something more banal than breathtaking.
– In-house teams –
They had people but their people didn’t have the time nor skills / xp to carry this out properly.
– Research agency –
Commissioning an agency = high spend and a real risk of unsatisfactory results.
So… step in Customer iQ – a research and insight consultancy which works like having your own in-house insight team.
Your challenge = our challenge.
And, in this case, challenge accepted!
We quickly got to work – reviewing existing click data before recruiting a sample of customers for deep-dive one-to-one interviews. We needed to speak to people in order to get under their skin – not rely on empirical data.
The interviews allowed us to really get to know their customers – as PEOPLE, not users. Covering their background, lifestyle, desires, needs, concerns, product usage and future ambitions.
And these conversations allowed us to identify some clear customer types among the wider customer base.
The result?
A clear, fully developed and inspiring set of customer personas that the business could adopt, slot in and use to drive all machinery forward in alignment. A very happy client.
A great project to work on.
Interested to find out more? Contact us for a chat.
