Wednesday 12th May 2010 by Peter Furtado

We’re not the only consultancy to encourage our customers to do persona profiling; but we’re probably more ambitious about it than most, hoping you’ll get much more than the usual benefits of market understanding and usable design. As characterisations of typical customers (current or future), if you only treat your personas as people you can interrogate or sell to, you are going to let them – and yourselves – down. They’re worth more than that.

At the heart of any success in the online world is your ability to build supportive, interesting and long-lasting relationships. That means you’re in the people business, and so you’ve got a basic choice to make: should you treat customers as punters who you can screw every last penny out of, or engage with them to add value (to you, and to them) and to discover mutual benefit?

Assuming the answer is the latter – and the ubiquity of words like ‘trust’ and ‘social’ in discussions of online marketing suggests that for most businesses it’s the answer they aspire to– then you have to remember that engagement is two-way: as well as setting out to be engaging to your customers, you have also to be engaged by them. And that means permitting yourself to get to know them on their own terms, as well as on yours.

Getting to know you

So, when we do persona profiling with you, we aren’t just looking to construct a representative of a demographic, or even a demographic plus some goals and attitudes. We’re looking for you to act as much like a novelist as a marketer. We’d like you to conjure up a character you can continue to get to know and interact with, to listen to and understand (but not interrogate, which is altogether too brutal).

Significant online relationships, just like offline ones, can’t be one-dimensional or linear (buy/sell); or even two-dimensional (buy/sell; inform/read). They have to be three-dimensional (buy/sell; inform/read; share/collaborate).

Hence the ‘fluffy’ questions about where your personas live, what sort of family they have, what education they had, what magazines they read, which are there to help you add what in politics is called a hinterland, that vital extra human dimension that makes someone seem real. If you race through these, you’ll be missing out on half the value of the exercise.

And that’s why we urge you, when you create your personas, not just to avoid the obvious hazards of caricature and absurdity, but also to create characters you actually like. It may sound odd, but it’s not uncommon for people to come up with one or more of the personas with motivations, or even personal characteristics and habits, that they want to laugh at, or even despise. Perhaps they’re taking the novelist analogy a bit far: but a good novel really needs conflict, drama and possibly tragedy whereas most businesses want those things well away from their web presence.

It’s not essential to feel warm and cuddly about each one of your personas, of course, but laughing at them certainly should throw up a warning flag: are you really in a business where you don’t actually like the customers? If you are, how well do you, or can you, know them? What does disliking your customers say about you, and your chances of success?

Collaborating with your personas on your community

If you do know your personas well, respect them and like them, then there’s a much greater chance that they’ll stay in your mind, and that their thoughts, feelings and needs will support not just your information architecture, but the hundreds of other decisions you’ll be making. In particular there’s a much greater chance that you will create a community space that they will want to use, will enjoy using, and will benefit from.

Even if a community space – eBay for example - allows valuable transactions that could occur no other way, each member still has to want to invest time and emotional energy in it, to trust it and its other members. It requires behaviours that are accepted by buyers and sellers and make them feel comfortable about being there. And that means really knowing the people who will use it, understanding how they want to behave (and how they might misbehave), and planning accordingly. You need to do that too. It’s so much easier if you make your personas your friend.

Postscript (Latin for afterword)

I’ve noticed people sometimes get a bit uncomfortable with the word ‘persona’: is it singular or plural? (It sounds like ‘data’ which is really a plural word – properly speaking, you ought to say ‘the data are reliable’, not ‘the data is reliable’. Does persona work like that too?)

It all comes down to the complications of Latin grammar of course, but the short answer is ‘no’. Data is the plural of the noun datum – meaning something given. But persona is already a singular form (it actually means a theatrical mask). Strictly speaking, its plural form is personae. But using that would create a whole lot more problems for Latin-speaking pedants like me (we’d need to use different forms depending on where in the sentence the word occurred), so let’s just relax and talk about one persona or two or more personas.