Personas

I found the readings on the persona lifecycle to be quite interesting and different on the material I would’ve expected to read. I wasn’t expecting to be initially introduced to the process of how to create a persona - I didn’t know there were that many guidelines! But, I guess in the end it all made sense…you need certain steps to go trough, as in any other research & development activity, to develop a successful prototype of your persona.

Karen, from Procter & Gamble had already given us an idea about what the “persona” concept is. She showed us the type of persona they’d worked with for their new ageless makeup (Maybelline) line, and explained to us who this persona was- characteristics, insights, personality, etc. I guess it sounds kind of obvious, at least for me, when you’re able to see a connection between the final product and who this user is, for the brand. But, to my surprise after having read the articles on the persona, there’s a lot of thinking, research and planning involved.

Maybe you’re wondering what is a persona? I was trying to come up with a definition on my own, but instead found on a blog, a very simple and yet, useful explanation of the meaning of the persona. “Personas are fictional characters created to represent different segments of the market or target demographics.” So, with this in mind, we can see that personas are created by companies for a purpose- to understand who their prime users are. Personas are given by marketers, a certain age, gender, education, life style, needs, goals, expectancies, ethnicity, and many other things- including names-, so that companies know who they are dealing with and who are they trying to reach. But, to know all of these previous characteristics about your persona, marketers need first to go throughout the persona lifecycle-which consists of 5 phases. These are: family planning, persona conception and gestation, persona birth and maturation, persona adulthood, and persona lifetime achievement, reuse and retirement. The phases of conception and gestation, and adulthood are the vital steps. In conception and gestation, marketers are working on using and converting the information they’ve already gained about potential user population, user research data, demographic information, etc. to translate it into valuable information of their personas. This way they are able to understand the specific user roles, user goals, and user segments that uniquely describe their “target” users. In the adulthood phase, personas already have been introduced to the company and to the product team, so it is now time for the personas to be of use for designing and developing the product. Personas are used to help the product team plan, design, evaluate and release the products. They ask questions like: “Will Tom want to use a big object or a smaller one?” or “Will Sarah be interested on this feature? ”

If a marketer would like to create an accurate persona of people like me, they would probably come up with the following description:

She’s in her early 20’s. She is still a college student, with many goals of her own, and who is actively engaged in her education. Still don’t work, but her parents still look after her. She wishes to take the most out of everything- if she hears a conference is coming up, she’ll be willing to go, she participates in almost every single one of her classes, she is extremely responsible when it comes to projects and homework. She tries to always stay fit-eats healthy, goes to gym or runs every once in a while. She always has things to do- goes out with her friends, loves going to the salon every once in a while, cleans up her room, goes shopping. She barely stays at home just watching a movie by herself, if she were to do it she’d had to watch it with someone else. She is a people-person; she loves to always know about what’s going on with her friends, with her family, etc. She loves to travel and tries to go out of town minimum 5 times a year, and tries to organize a trip with her friend minimum once a year. Loves shopping. Loves going out- clubs, restaurants. We’ll call her ANNA- the active-college student.

A brand persona isn’t the same persona for all brands in the same category. The persona for Mc Donald’s isn’t the same persona as it is for Wendy’s. Brands need to differentiate, and one of the ways they do this is by developing a detailed and unique persona (or many if they need it), to understand what brand products suit them the best. So, this leads us to the conclusion that developing personas, it’s a very helpful strategy for companies to differentiate among themselves and get a better approach to their target users.