futurenow - getting started with building personas
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Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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Getting Started With Building PersonasBy: Howard Kaplan
In this unprecedented day of empowered consumers, “selling” to customers is 100% about facilitating their buying process.
Consumers are looking for information that’s transparent, genuine, relevant and salient. That’s why its critical to anticipate what
each customer type (or persona) might need or want to see in order to feel confident in taking the actions that you want them to
take, such as filling out a lead form or proceeding to checkout.
This whitepaper will go through the basic persona building steps. This paper is based on a collection of Persona Building blog
posts from FutureNow’s GrokDotCom blog. GrokDotCom offers fresh, interactive marketing insights on strategies and tactics.
Topics range from a/b testing, persona building to persuasive copywriting. It’s updated daily and is one of the web’s top 25
marketing blogs (www.grokdotcom.com).
“Does your website speak to me?”
© 2008 FutureNow, Inc
All rights reserved. Copying or reproducing this document in part or in full is not permitted without the prior consent of FutureNow, Inc. Please
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The Common Mistake Marketers often ask: “How do we know which types of people
make up our audience?” Many try to answer this question by
hiring a research firm. This is a fast and easy way to go about
the issue, but results are typically minimal. This is because:
• Results are usually too general (i.e. your audience is
made up of “Info-Driven types,” “Conquerors,” and
“Browse-2-Buy” types)
• Research firms ask about past purchases, which are
not great predictors of future behavior
Don’t Trust What People Say!Believe what people do, not what they say they’ll do. Why?
People don’t always tell the truth. They’ll tell you:
• What they think you want to hear;
• What they want to be perceived as;
• Something they simply don’t know (the right brain
makes the decisions, and the left brain articulates and
rationalizes them, yet both sides of the brain “speak” in
different languages).
Actions speak volumes louder than words. Asking consumers
to fill out an incentivized survey may not give you the most
accurate results, and is not a true indicator of their future
behavior on your site.
The Big QuestionDon’t worry about “Who makes up my audience?” “Who”
makes up your audience is irrelevant. Focus on “How will
each different type of person approach and buy my
product?”
Here are some examples that illustrate the importance of
consumer buying modes:
Example 1:
My mom is a Methodical personality type, meaning her
preference dictates a logical process, and one that is
rather deliberate in its pace. She works professionally as a
bookkeeper and routinely catches oversights by her auditors.
She remarks with bewilderment that someone whose
singular concern is maintaining hyper-accuracy of the data
can so easily miss the details. Notice, she wouldn’t qualify
the details as minute, though to many others they would be.
To a strong Methodical, no detail is too fine. When she buys,
chances are she’ll ask 10 - 20 extra questions than most
other buyers, and with each successful answer, she’ll gain a
little more confidence.
Example 2:
My preference shares her bias towards a logical process,
but has a much faster pace, what we call a Competitive
personality type. Whereas Methodicals need a sense of
order (or structure) to their process to gain confidence over
time, Competitives are perfectly comfortable living amongst
the chaos, and letting intuition guide their decision making
process. The Competitive type can quickly dismiss logical-
sounding fluff. Think like “The Donald,” and you are probably
closely resembling the Competitive’s approach. When he
buys, he’s in a hurry, and just wants the bottom line.
The key word in the examples above is preference. My
mother doesn’t methodically choose where to get her nails
done, or where to go for a special dinner. In both of those
cases, she buys more experientially, favoring more of an
emotional process, and eschewing her normal deliberate
pace for a much quicker one. She’s quite comfortable giving
it a whirl. After all, “How bad could it be”? (Spoken like a
true Spontaneous type, she’s operating outside of her typical
buying mode.)
The Take AwayKnowing your audiences’ type doesn’t tell you which mode
they’ll be in once they visit your site and buy your product.
Traditional research cannot provide an accurate answer for
that. Consumers do not know for sure what they’ll do once
on your site. That’s why it’s critical to anticipate different
scenarios and provide answers to any possible questions that
Actions speak volumes louder than words. Asking consumers
Persona Buying Modes
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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consumers might have while on your site. This involves using
live test subjects. The experiment needs to be designed so
that the subjects do not know they’re participating. This way,
they are actually operating according to their own motivation,
which makes the experience become the experiment.
Planning the customer experience in advance will allow
you to hypothesize consumer motivations that’ll drive their
buying process (or what buying mode they’ll be in) and test
their actual behavior—in a real environment—thus proving
your assumptions about their motivations and optimizing the
experience accordingly.
Getting Started on Your Persona ProjectNo one knows your business better than you do, so to help
you get started with your persona-building project, try this
exercise:
1. Assemble a small team (2 - 4 members) with diverse
backgrounds. Make sure to include people who have
close contact with end customers, and have a strong
understanding of the value proposition (benefits) for
the customers. Don’t worry about explicitly including
experts in your business for now. The goal is to better
understand the buying process, not redoing the sales
process.
2. Give everyone on the team 15 minutes to brainstorm
as many attributes as they can about the product,
why someone would buy it, or what makes it unique.
Collect these attributes, and combine them on a
central whiteboard for all to see and discuss to ensure
clarity.
For example:
3. Next to each attribute, gain consensus on whether
it’s more likely to be appealing to logic or to emotion.
Resist the urge to say “both” for each attribute; the
exercise is designed to make sure you make some
hard decisions. Re-sort the list into logical attributes
on one sheet, and emotional on the other.
4. Now repeat the process, this time gaining consensus
on how hard it is to understand the attribute, and
to which pace it’s likely to appeal. Is the attribute
something concrete and crystal clear to anyone after
3 seconds of reading it? Or does it require a bit
more education or a finer, subtle experience level to
reach its full value? Re-sort each list according to
“faster” (quick) or “slower” (deliberate) pace.
5. You now have 4 lists sorted into quick/logical, quick/emotional,
deliberate/logical, and deliberate/emotional attributes.
Lastly, take these lists of attributes and make them more
concrete by using your demographic data and your market
“segments” to build a profile or a story that sets the context
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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for the attributes on your lists to be appealing.
You’ve just taken the first step towards building a system to
plan different experiences for different types of people! These
insights can all be easily executed on the same website,
within the same copy, that provides feedback to prove or
disprove the motivations and attributes you assumed. You’ve
begun to answer question 1 of the 3 essential questions (see
below) for designing a persuasive system.
The Essential ThreeYou must answer these questions in order to effectively map
the buying process to the selling process:
1. Who do you need to persuade?
2. What actions do they need to take to satisfy their
(and your) objectives? I’m not referring simply to
the ultimate conversion goal; I’m talking about every
single action these people will take on your site – first
click, last click and all the clicks in between. Each click
is a point of conversion in your persuasive process.
3. What is the most effective way to persuade these
people to take action? How are you going to motivate
them to make conscious decisions to click on the
hyperlinks that will take them deeper into your
persuasive process?
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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Your Four Basic PersonasNot sure what your four sorted lists mean? Below is a snapshot of each persona’s basic attributes. You now have all the
building blocks for your persona project.
Competitive Perspective
Humanistic Perspective
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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Now, start building your personas! Align your sales process with the customers’ buying process.
Methodical Perspective
Spontaneous Perspective
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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Favorite Comments From Grokdotcom Readers:
I agree with you that ‘asking’ customers for preferences or feedback has never served to reveal reality. That is why we profess
that actual observation of customers and their behaviors is much valuable than the traditional surveys or secret shopper
approaches.
I profess that you can’t outsource customer experience; the interaction with the customer is too strategic to leave it to someone
to do it for you, or to tell you about it.
-Rob HowardCEO, Clearbrick LLC
Your assessment of Persona development option #1 is BRUTAL (and yet amusing, in a ghoulish sort of way)! Unfortunately, I
think you make the case that it’s also pretty accurate.
I am FAR from an expert in the whole concept of developing and applying Personas, but from a “beginner’s mind,” here are
some areas I think there is a lot of confusion among those not as steeped in the methodology as you and others that “get it”
better than most of us…
TYPE vs. MODE– you do a good job w/ your mother story helping articulate the difference. Not always obvious at first blush to
many.
DEMOGRAPHIC vs. PERSONA– yes, I was there during the “after session” at Internet Retailer (no apologies necessary),
and it was obvious that many folks who have spent TONS of time and money on DEMOGRAPHIC profiling have a hard time
distinguishing that from Personas. Or perhaps more accurately, after having spent so much time and money on demographic
research and technology, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that it’s of limited value in developing usable Personas.
“PERSONA-FICATION” vs. PERSONALIZATION– Bryan addresses this a bit in the ClickZ article you reference. While not
a direct correlation to persuasion architecture, I thought the YesMail presentation at IR gave some good examples of where
“personalization” as we’ve come to conveniently define it falls short in understanding the MODE a visitor is in at the time of a
touch– be that online or via email.
“UI” vs. CONTENT– I like what Bryan says about the persuasion “UI” being the content rather than the navigation (my
paraphrasing). My understanding of the proper application of a Persona-orientation (if you’ll forgive the Newtonian physics
metaphors) is NOT in reducing sales process FRICTION found in UI, navigation, linear sales processes, etc., but to increase the
GRAVITATION effect drawing the guest into a sphere of influence (persuasion) based on really understanding them (and their
needs, motivations at POA) rather than just conveniently labeling them.
My thoughts and observations as a relative “newbie” to the conversation, for what their worth. That and $4.60 will get you priority
mail postage…
-Kurt HaugFounder and Principal, Shuriken Systems
I agree that most traditional market research is a laugh. A colleague of mine makes this obvious with the following typical
research question: “Can you please tell us why you did not buy a white shirt from our company yesterday?”
-Ewald Verhoog
Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com
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Related Articles On Grokdotcom
See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps
http://www.grokdotcom.com/category/personas/
How to Avoid Marketing to Yourself
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/05/30/marketing-to-yourself/
3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/25/3-reasons-your-visitors-dont-convert-to-leads/
Interview on Persuasion Architecture, Personas and ROI
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/17/king-conversion-interview/
Persona Models Presentation at SMX West 2008
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/03/04/smx-persona-presentation/
About UsFutureNow, Inc. is a New York City based interactive marketing optimization firm. Our passion is helping clients to better un-
derstand their website visitors and how to monetize their traffic. Our Persuasion Architecture™ methodology combines proven
consumer psychology and website usability techniques to plan, launch and optimize marketing campaigns — online and across
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