Personas make marketers stupid: It’s time to embrace the complexity of human behaviour
Despite what the marketing guidebook will tell you, personas are actually a classic case of great intention but poor execution, argues Neo’s Michelle Gilmore.
Understanding customers better than competitors was once an advantage; now it’s critical to survival. However, misunderstanding a market can be as dangerous or damaging as not understanding it at all.
When trying to understand and define a target market, there is a strong tendency to over-simplify. But target markets are made up of human beings, and human beings are complex.
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash
You can’t discount personas because they are being used incorrectly.
While marketing departments maybe adopting them, personas are a human-centered design artifact to represent findings from user research and help designers create solutions with a specific users in mind. If you are creating personas based on assumptions or stereotypes then they are you are simply doing them wrong.
Have to agree with @Persona – there’s place for psychographic categorisation in this field. It would be impossible to define every nuance of character within these profiles, but done correctly they can definitely improve efficacy of BCD. Michelle touches on this herself with the risk profiling example. Good article though; great to read a creative discussing this stuff.
Thanks Antony!
I’m not suggesting that we should abandon categorisation, rather evolve the methods we used to do this.
Best,
MG
Thanks, Persona. Appreciate the feedback.
Great tools work and if people are using them in the ‘wrong’ way perhaps the tool is broken. We as designers have a responsibility to encourage useful thinking in decision makers. Personas don’t do this. I’m seeing stereotypes encouraged and biases amplified on real projects across corporate, not-for-profit and government sectors.
I’m sure they were useful in the past, I’m suggesting that we evolve towards methods that embrace complexity.
Best,
Michelle
It’s a fair criticism. Personas are an expected part of the process but quite often are very shallow in scope and based on relatively little information. Rather than just supplying the criticism, though, I’d be interested to hear what you’re suggesting for an alternative way of working, given that we are all interested in continued education and doing our best for our clients.
Hi Linda!
Thanks for your feedback, here’s the alternative method that we have been exploring, called behavioural profiling: https://medium.com/@michellegilmore/yes-but-what-does-behavioural-profiling-actually-look-like-a0c7814e3ffa
I agree – solutions/alternatives should accompany criticism.
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Best,
Michelle.
I work in an organisation where we had our design agency come in for a half day workshop to create personas for our core products suite. This utilised primarily demographic data and internal thinking (stereotyped and biased). These ‘personas’ were then used to develop a new website…. flawed much? I think Michelle’s article is spot on, personas are quickly becoming a ‘tickbox’ exercise to demonstrate customer centricity and personalisation when, in many cases, the outputs are neither. There are two sides here though as many organisations (mine included) do not capture the necessary behavioural data to allow for more complex customer analysis and builds, and no amount of ‘evolved’ design approaches can fix this fundamental flaw. Advances need to be made on both the design and data capture front in order to create products and services with the customer truly at the centre.
Hi Kerri.
Thank you for your comment. It’s a shame that agencies are still charging for an artefact that doesn’t lead to better outcomes. I’m sorry you had to go through this. I agree data integrity is key and our intelligence is only as good as the evidence we use. I hope that in time, organisations stop paying for the simplistic templates and commit to dynamic frameworks that change over time and lead to better decision making.
Best,
Michelle.