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Why the Best Marketers Have Imaginary Friends The Importance of Creating an In-Depth Customer Persona By Marie Elwood, Brand Marketing Consultant  February 15, 2011 - Speed Dial Issue 63

Most of us think we have a pretty good understanding of our target audience, don’t we?

If you’re a marketing professional in a big company, you’ve probably got a variety of demographics, psychographics, A & U reports, and segmentation studies at your fingertips. If you work in a smaller firm, you’ve got insights from the field, industry reports, and some memorable stories & observations about your customers or clients.

That’s not enough- - not if your goal is to cut through a cluttered, crowded market and really connect with the people who should be buying your product or service.

Let me explain.

Take everything you know about your customers right now and put it a big pot. Go ahead: dump in the insights, reports, stories from the sales field, and everything you’ve learned after all these years. Now stir it up and take a sip. What does it taste like? With everything you’ve got in there, can you pick any particular flavor out from among all those ingredients?

Don’t stop there- -  let’s slip on over to your top competitor’s kitchen. They’ve got their soup simmering too. Take a taste. Is there any noticeable difference- - or have they used the same types of ingredients you have?

So here’s my point: while you may know a lot about your target audience, doesn’t your competition know the same things? And have either of you really worked to refine your understanding of who- - exactly who- - you’re trying to reach?

The answer, usually, is no. What most of us do is to take all the information we have and try to create a composite of our “target audience”, don’t we? But because it's a composite, our vision is usually too blurry to be useful. We want to go beyond having just a fuzzy idea of our “target audience” to creating a focused, almost-holographic vision of our most important customer.

Here's what I mean: if I asked you to introduce me to your very best friend, you could talk for hours about him or her, couldn’t you? You’d be able to tell everything about what he likes to do, what makes him happy, what disappoints him, what ticks him off, his weird little quirks, how he views the world, what he’s trying to achieve… and we’re just getting started! By the time you’re done telling me about your friend, he wouldn’t be just "some guy" to me any more- - I’d feel like I know him, in a uniquely different way than I would had you described anyone else in the world.

Author Jill Konrath calls this a “customer persona" and shows why it's so important:

“Years ago I attended a conference where Phillips, the electronics giant, presented a session on how they came up with their bestselling products. They’d created a prototypical family that represented their target market. Then they created a ‘ficticious’ persona for each family member, complete with the person’s age, education level, occupation, interests, beliefs, priorities, & daily schedule. Finally, to make them seem more real, they gave each person a name. When the people at Phillips discussed new product ideas, they’d continually ask, “would this be something Karl would like”, or “what are the biggest annoyances in Kristina’s life?...

Shortly after that conference, I visited the VP of sales at a global medical devices company. Walking into his office, I was greeted by a life-sized cardboard cutout of a physician standing in his white lab coat with a stethoscope draped around his neck. When I asked about it, the VP replied: 'He’s our customer, and we need to consider him in every decision we make. I’m always thinking about his needs, issues, and objectives.'”

As you can imagine, this can dramatically transform your business. Begin by taking what you know now and start interviewing 5-6 of the real people who represent your ideal customers (let me help you). You simply can't "guess" : direct conversations are absolutely non-negotiable to get the information you need.

Presenting yourself as all things to all people just doesn’t cut it any more, not when we're faced with a distracted, busy audience in a sluggish economy. You need to know exactly who you’re trying to reach, exactly what they need, and exactly how to get their attention. In today’s environment, the marketers who win are the ones who can clearly see their “imaginary” friends. You can be one of them.

Thanks for joining me today- - and I’ll see you again on March 1st!

Marie

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