Market Research to Inform ‘Customer Personas’
This is an interesting idea… I’m not sure about taking it to it’s logical conclusion with customers paying for the service, obviously a marketer would be their preferred source for this information, but here goes. The Forty Agency posted How Targeted is Your Target Audience?
Forty Agency’s Take on Research + Personas
Their practice is to use research + gut instinct to create customer personas that inform their clients about customers – interests, motivations, preferences, etcetera. Basically a psychographic and sociocultural foundation beneath what we would normally think of as a usability practice – personas. The end result is the encapsulation of the clients customers in persona form. These are glossy graphic designed artifacts worthy of any design agency.
A Slight Modification is in Order
I can see a lot of potential for melding these methodologies together. However, I would remove gut instinct from the game plan and use the opportunity to figure out whether the current customer is the most lucrative (or even the right) customer for the client. Often businesses eke out a living serving one market segment (niche) only to be unaware that another more lucrative segment is attainable.
Having customers is one thing – having the right customers is what makes the difference between moderate returns and making major profits. To discover this information you need to go back to the beginning and do major research.
How to Generate a Marketing Document
The first step is to perform an external SLEPT (social, legal, economic, political and technological) Analysis, an Internal Analysis, a Customer Analysis, a Competitor Analysis, and an Industry Analysis. This helps to identify demographic, psychographic, and environmental constraints that influence what the business can achieve and markets it can service. This research identifies market segment(s) that can be realistically served. And it reveals the resources and capabilities available to the business – because its pointless to make unachievable goals.
This research feeds into an honest SWOT analysis. I don’t mean a crap one where the business is good and everyone else is bad – garbage in / garbage out. Be critical and honest or suffer the consequences. Value is in knowing real constraints. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the business… opportunities and threats are external.
The SWOT should logically inform a number of SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) Goals and Objectives. This is harder than it sounds but if your research and analysis are up to speed then this is where the business plans to be at the end of a finite period of time. The goals must capitalise on strengths and opportunities while counteracting weaknesses and threats. That is the point of creating competitive strategy.
The goals and objectives inform the business of which strategies are achievable with their current resources in the business environment. This is what the business must do to target that segment and achieve those goals and objectives.
Finally, controls are set in place to measure success and failure. This is where analytics enter the fray… and where someone checks that things are done. How does the business know whether the marketing was a success or failure (a big arrow pointing back at the goals and objectives)?
Note that this is a live document – all businesses need to constantly monitor their environment and update this document as changes occur. Know it backwards.
Tying it into a Tight Ball for Delivery
At this point I would see great benefit to providing the client with the enhancement mentioned in the Forty Agency post – ‘customer personas’. Take the information from the research component of that report and provide what essentially we are used to seeing as user personas – give a name, face and identity to the segment(s) that are the clients customers. Print that in glossy graphic designed artifacts and hope they smile when they receive the bill.
However, I would probably shy away from half-researching and gut instinct because segmentation should always be achieved through actual research and hard facts and figures. Think of it as requiring proof about what your gut instinct has been telling you (and be prepared to be wrong). I do like the idea of integrating personas into the client deliverables at the end of this cycle, even if it only helps them buy in emotionally to the rest of the document.
I’m going to have to figure a way to achieve this without blowing their budget… one extra day writing personas + graphic designer + publishing. Will they pay?
June 23rd, 2010 at 10:25 am
Great write up, Steven.
The key point you bring up in this post is “without blowing their budget.” As much as we’d love every one of our clients to dish out the cash to do extensive market research, for the most part, no one can see the value in that practice. Doing this research is definitely an important step that shouldn’t be skipped, but the 50k+ price tag associated with an external market research company or the 30k+ price tag for the time it takes internally is routinely shot down.
The personas blend what we already know as marketers (gut instinct comes with the territory, if you don’t have it, you’re in the wrong field) as well what we can research based on their budget. These customer personas turn this small-ish amount of data into usable, understandable, and tangible customer profiles the client can use to move forward anywhere in his or her business. The resulting profiles provide a great high-level view of some potential customers of the product and allow us to use something other than data, numbers, charts, and graphs to better understand their customers on a more personal level.
We’re all drawn to more easily understood displays of information, right?
June 23rd, 2010 at 11:28 am
Hi Kim, all true… and I’m kind of surprised that I never considered melding personas in this direction earlier simply because they lend themselves so well to getting stakeholder buy-in.
However, I would probably encourage any business to at least maintain a set of strategic documents on an ongoing basis… marketing firms, in that regard, are over-pricing their work – maintaining large offices can be expensive. We’re probably paying mostly for brand and credibility and less for the actual research and report.
At the Australian small business level I would expect I could get a decent document together for a few thousand Australian dollars… at the most.
But I would strongly encourage any business to start writing their own research and analysis – what are their competitors doing, what is the industry doing, how are the statistics and so forth moving as per trends… because if they’re not competing in that space and being complacent – well, someone will take it off them soon enough who is willing to do the legwork.
My post was really about running with that idea and asking whether the business is even targeting the right customers… and that can be valuable research to the bottom line. Handing personas of these people and asking for buy-in to a plan to address that segment would be really valuable.
But the idea is still rolling in my head at the moment. Nice article, I enjoy reading things that make me think and question.
I’ve long been a fan of personas BTW. Enjoy your day (or I guess there it’s night).
June 23rd, 2010 at 4:05 pm
I definitely agree that personas don’t stand well enough on their own. Without context of the general brand and market outlook, they’re just Facebook profiles
Thankfully, we include ours within our handy little Brand Handbook we create for clients that explore all aspects of their brand, including their customer-base: http://www.fortyagency.com/stuff/post/brand-handbook
So I agree that personas can only be as valuable as the other research that goes along with them.
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Kim, yes I love your literature. I think that’s what drew me in… [great envy]