Persona DevelopmentLesson 2: Developing Personas

DIGITAL LECTURE SERIES

Lesson Objective(s)

•Demonstrate how to organize information to develop personas•Highlight the key components of a Persona Report

Welcome back everyone!

First off, a quick shout-out to Perry Ellis for outfitting me in this beautiful peak lapel suit for today’s lecture. Good looking-out Perry!

In today’s lesson, we run through how to take information gathered persona development to…

…create these Persona Reports that you can - and should! - share across your organization.

If you remember the Persona Development framework from the last class…

PersonaDevelopment

IdentifierVariables

ResponseVariables

Consumer Market

Business Market

Demographic

Psychographic

Behavioral

Geographic

Market Size

Benefits Desired

Application or Usage Situation

Sensitivity to Marketing Mix

Purchasing Behavior

PersonaDevelopment

IdentifierVariables

ResponseVariables

Consumer Market

Business Market

Demographic

Psychographic

Behavioral

Geographic

Market Size

Benefits Desired

Application or Usage Situation

Sensitivity to Marketing Mix

Purchasing Behavior

These are the inputs you MUST gather in your research phase.

PersonaDevelopment

IdentifierVariables

ResponseVariables

Consumer Market

Business Market

Demographic

Psychographic

Behavioral

Geographic

Market Size

Benefits Desired

Application or Usage Situation

Sensitivity to Marketing Mix

Purchasing Behavior

Specifically…

PersonaDevelopment

IdentifierVariables

ResponseVariables

Consumer Market

Business Market

Demographic

Psychographic

Behavioral

Geographic

Market Size

Benefits Desired

Application or Usage Situation

Sensitivity to Marketing Mix

Purchasing Behavior

We gather information from three sources:

Three Sources of Information

1. Internal Interviews (conducted with the company team)2. External Interviews (conducted with current and prospective customers)3. External Research (databases, market research sources)

After we gather our data, we organize it in a “Fact Pack”.

Data Assumptions Critical Unknowns

Data 1 Assumption 1 Critical Unknown 1

D2 A2 CU2

D3 A3 CU3

D4 A4 CU4

A “Fact Pack” looks like this.

Data Assumptions Critical Unknowns

Data 1 Assumption 1 Critical Unknown 1

D2 A2 CU2

D3 A3 CU3

D4 A4 CU4

# Data #Assumptions #Critical Unknowns

20 5 5

Next we add up the inputs in the three categories.

Data Assumptions Critical Unknowns

Data 1 Assumption 1 Critical Unknown 1

D2 A2 CU2

D3 A3 CU3

D4 A4 CU4

# Data #Assumptions #Critical Unknowns

20 5 5

We aim for a 70%/30% mix between (i) data and (ii) assumptions/critical unknowns.

# Data #Assumptions #Critical Unknowns

20 5 5

In this example, we have 20 inputs of data and 10 inputs of assumptions and critical unknowns. This makes for a 67%/33% split. Close, but not there yet. Looks like we need more external research to validate/invalidate assumptions and/or answer some critical unknowns!

Once we get our desired 70%/30% split, we start putting together the Persona Report. This is where the magic happens!

# Data #Assumptions #Critical Unknowns

23 4 3

To illustrate, let’s see an example created by Intern Chris for one of his class projects. He created a site called mountainbikingsandiego.com and developed a persona for it. So meet Bill!

The image is important for all functions of your business to empathize with the customer.

This is the persona narrative. It develops a back story to Bill and captures his demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits.

Oh SNAP! Ha, I love doing that. This stands for Segment Needs And Performance. The dark blue columns exhibit how high the persona values an attribute and the lighter blue columns exhibit how your company is performing in meeting those needs. Looks like Intern Chris needs to shorten that “ease of use” gap PRONTO!

Is my hair in the way? Oh well. This lists Bill’s entry point to Intern Chris’s website. Good intel for SEO!

Our 2x2 matrix down here demonstrates BEHAVIORAL traits. What are Bill’s goals, influencers, questions he asks, and approach? If we know that, then we can generate a RESPONSE.

Finally, these are Bill’s frustrations and pain points. How we can alleviate them?

For those of you developing or redeveloping websites, the inputs from the Persona Reports can be used for Conversion Design. For instance…

…developing your Information Architecture…

…and the Plausible User Case Scenarios.

…but we’ll talk about that in the Conversion Design lecture series.

So that’s today’s lesson! In our next class, we’ll develop a value proposition tailored to your persona using Value Curves!

Lesson Recap

• There are three sources of information you need to gather to develop personas.•Follow the 70/30 rule to information organization. •Every section of the Persona Report counts! It reflects demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral traits.

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