Why Use Personas?

THE GOAL IS ENGAGEMENT

All communications are fundamentally persuasive.  Marketers hope the choices they’ve made—whether it’s through content, technology, or experiences–will deliver the results they seek.

If you use a strategy that doesn’t resonate, you won’t get results.  You are not the only one competing for attention in the social space.  No matter what your goal–brand engagement, fundraising, advocacy, or behavior change–many others are out there trying to attract and engage the same audience.

THE KEY: TRIGGERING EMOTION THROUGH EMPATHY

A persona, sometimes called an avatar, is a model, representation or archetype of a customer that represents a set of behavioral patterns, goals, attitudes, needs and values. They are sometimes called buyer personas or user personas, but no matter what you call them, they serve the same purpose.   They are a tool to see your audience as people with feelings and desires, goals and challenges, not numbers.

By using a persona-based strategy, you can create a relevant and meaningful campaign that not only gets your audience’s attention but triggers their emotions.  Take the time to get to identify and develop empathy for your audience through persona development. Then, your persona-based strategy can drive an integrated campaign across multiple channels that will do far more than get their attention.  You can spark emotions, provide meaning and develop a long-term relationship.  This is the essence of sustainable audience engagement.

To achieve engagement, you must use psychology to connect with your audience’s needs, goals, desires, and values.  Every audience is different.  Your goal is to identify the key components that ignite YOUR audience, understand their story, and craft a journey that offers a transformative experience. This lays the foundation for a lasting relationship.  When you use psychology to connect meaningfully, your brand becomes a companion on a journey, integrated with identity and self-image.

WHAT IS ENGAGEMENT

Before you start developing your persona, it’s important to identify your goal and what you mean by engagement?  We use the word ‘engagement’ a lot.  It sounds important and meaningful.   From a relational perspective, engagement implies a level of commitment,  a continued relationship, and positive emotions, such as love.  Keep in mind that a committment to marry is called an engagement.  Engagement can also mean getting and sustaining someone’s attention in a way that influences future behaviors such as purchasing, consuming, donating, taking up an exercise program or stopping smoking.  How you define engagement matters.

Is Attention = Engagement?

With the advent of social marketing, there are lots of ways to define and measure attention as a proxy for engagement, such as likes, shares and click-throughs.

Everyone wants to engage their audience, but how many do?  Google “audience engagement” and see how many hits you get.  Reuters reported that more half of the companies they polled said that improving audience engagement was their highest priority.  But the difference between having an abstract goal of engagement and practical engagement can make the difference between success and failure.

If you can’t define something, you can’t operationalize and measure it.  If you don’t know how others measure engagement, you can’t tell if the results have meaning for your goals.

• What do you mean when you talk about audience engagement?
• Are your definitions and measures consistent — is everyone measuring the same thing?  Do they need to be?

THEORY OF ENGAGEMENT

There is a lot of scholarly literature on engagement defined as the psychological process and experience of being engaged, such as Optimal Engagement or Flow by Csikszentmihalyi.  These describe what it feels like to be engaged, the psychological outcomes of engagement, and the criteria necessary to achieve engagement.

FLOW IN PRACTICE

The theory of Flow gives you the criteria for cognitive absorption which is very useful in game and web design, but it doesn’t help the precursor to engagement: how to attract attention and convert attention into action.  

YOUR DEFINITION OF ENGAGEMENT = YOUR AUDIENCE + YOUR GOAL

To define engagement in a way that is useful, you must answer two questions:

• Who you are talking to?
• What do you want them to do?

YOUR AUDIENCE

Once you start to focus in on who your audience is, psychological theory gets really useful.  Not just Flow but the whole range of psychological drivers, like identity, cognitive processing, narrative construction, developmental stages, emotion, and neuroscience.  Once you identify your audience, you can use context to build your personas based on the dominant psychological drivers that influence their behavior.

TRADITIONAL AUDIENCE SEGMENTING

Audience segmetnation isn’t new.  In the days of Mad Men (and until fairly recently), a group of folks sat around a table and decided who their customer was. The customer wasn’t involved.  Think about Kodak.  The company whose name was synonymous for picture-taking filed for bankruptcy in 2012.  The group of folks around that table didn’t believe that their customers would want to go digital.  They had the technbology to make digital cameras, but they didn’t understand that taking pictures isn’t about taking pictures.  It is about capturing and sharing memories, self-expression, and identity exploration.  They also overlooked the universality of those desires and the cost of entry, financially and practically, that limited access to those fundamental human goals. 

With the advent of AI and big data, audience segementation is increasingly sophisticated and targeted.  Companies advertise their ability to identify increasingly niche audience segments.

Persona development is another method of audience segmenting and profiling.  It has something that even AI and big data approaches that offer increasingly sophisticated and targeted niche audience segments can’t supply.  Persona development gives you the ‘why.’  If you have that answer, then all that AI and data becomes much, much more valuable becuase you now know not what people did, but what motivated their actions. See Listening to Your Customers Stories.

DON’T CONFUSE PSYCHOGRAPHICS WITH PSYCHOLOGY

Almost everyone knows that demographics, like age, income, race, and religion, isn’t enough information to segment an audience.

Psychographics are very popular because correlate behavior patterns and social structures with demographics.  Psychographics is a much better way of understanding an audience than demogrphics alone, but there is still a gap in the information you need to know.   

Psychographics are often used to create personas.  These psychographic-based personas produce profiles like Sally the Soccer Mom, Ivan the Investor, and Marty the Millennial.  Psychographics without psychological theory reduces data to stereotypes, not archetypes.  When you identify Sally as a “Soccer Mom,” you are activating internal stereotypes, mental models and cognitie biases in everyone who uses the persona.  These create a lens for interpreting behavior that have nothing to do with Sally as a human being, as a woman with goals, needs and desires to be or do something.  You know Sally drives an SUV, but you don’t know why.  Does it make her feel like a good caretaker?  Did she choose an SUV over a minivan because it speaks to her desire for adventure? Does it make her feel strong and capable?  Is it just a useful way to schelp kids and dogs?  What are the motivations behind her behavior?  Think about how this information alters strategy.

We need to better understand not just what Sally drives, but what drives Sally.

IT STARTS WITH WHY

When it comes to audience engagement, with a nod to Simon Sinek, it’s about the “why”.  As media psychologists, we use psychology to identify and engage audiences.  We’re interested in gathering data (the what) so we can figure out what drives the consumer (the why).  We intergrate quantitative and qualitative analysys to understand the internal narrative or story that drives each of us.  If we understand what motivates Sally, we are better positioned to deliver products and experiences that have meaning for her satisfy her goals.

EINSTEIN, INSANITY AND AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION

Einstein famously said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  It’s easy to fall into that definition of insanity (or worse) if you make assumptions about your audience without getting to know them.  To connect with your audience, you have to see through their eyes.  You have to step outside your mental models and frames of reference.  Sitting around a table talking about demographics and psychographics doesn’t give you insight or empathy for your audience.  It doesn’t let you see the world from their point of view or tell you what they want out of life.

COGNITIVE BIASES

The reason for this self-focused perspective is biological—our brains are selfish.  They see things from a self-centric point of view.  We have many inherent cognitive biases that make day-to-day living easier by speeding up information processing and decisionmaking, but they interfere with our ability to engage our audiences.  We unconsciously assume that others are like us. We project our motives and concerns.  Thinking takes a lot of energy (that’s not a joke!) Our reliance on rules of thumb is a product of a lazy brain that is designed to conserve energy and effort and, in the process, tricks us into thinking that we are our customers.

When you go through the process of persona development, adopt the mantra “I are NOT my customer.”  This will help you avoid unintentional assumptions and put a check on the natural tendencies toward cognitive shortcuts that will keep you from identifying and empathizing with the needs and motivations of others.

CONCLUSION

Many communicators and marketers think that their job is to put stuff out there—throw it against the wall and see if it sticks, A/B testing, whatever.  The trouble is, the results don’t tell you why something worked or something didn’t.  Every random or targeted communications test is based on inherent–and often unspoken–assumptions about the content and the audience.

Persona development does the research first.  It is a process of listening not just counting.  It allows you to be both empathetic and strategic.   Not only will you achieve better results in your campaigns, but by cultivating empathy you are doing yourself a favor.  Positive emotions have a beneficial halo-effect.  Learning to empathize with others improves all your relationships, not just with your customers.  Empathy lowers stress, iincreases the sense of social connection, dissolves barriers, adds meaning and makes better leaders, colleagues, partners and friends.

See How to Build a Persona.