Personas are an indispensable tool that allows organizations to build consensus, unify priorities, and formulate strategies targeted at their most crucial stakeholders. You might have heard of them with silly names like Budget Betty or Digital Darryl, but don’t be fooled – these names are just to make them memorable and to promote a shared language among team members. Make no mistake, personas are highly valuable for businesses.
Personas vary in depth of research, but the best approaches utilize both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research like interviews and ethnographic research reveal people’s goals, attitudes, and subtle nuances that distinguish different groups. Quantitative research through surveys then validates whether those insights apply more broadly across a target population. Combining both approaches provides a deeper understanding of personas and sizes the market opportunities they represent.
These personas are then used to guide marketing efforts, product development, and customer experience strategies. Personas allow businesses to develop a deep understanding of their customers and create tailored experiences that resonate with their needs and interests. Ultimately, personas are about creating empathy and understanding between businesses and their customers, leading to stronger relationships, greater loyalty, and better business outcomes.
A project example:
We recently finished a project for a large government organization where we investigated the needs of their computational researchers who’ll be accessing government data. We went in thinking these researchers were pretty tech-savvy.
When we did the quantitative research, we found two major segments:
- A younger group who used the latest tools like RStudio and Python
- An older group that used legacy analytic platforms like SAS and SPSS
Even though the stakeholders recognized the difference, they believed training would enable the older group to leverage the newer technology. But things only clicked for them when we created personas and gave a personality to each segment, and named them: “Computational Cara” and “Novice Nate”. The personas contained their goals, objectives, training, and many other attributes to really get a feel for who they were.
Suddenly, they saw that Novice Nate couldn’t simply be trained on new technology – he had been using SAS and SPSS for 25 years. It was like a lightbulb went off, and they started pushing for Nate’s needs. Ultimately, the research changed the roadmap to enable tools like SAS and SPSS. They are now even considering the opportunity to download data into excel to enable even more novice users the ability to access the data.
