The Limits and Dangers of Persona Marketing

Team_Eden | 2024-07-27

In marketing, personas are often seen as essential tools for understanding and segmenting audiences. While effective when used correctly, it's crucial to consider the inherent limitations and dangers of this method. This article delves into these negative aspects and provides advice on how to update and manage personas effectively.

What is a Persona in Marketing?

Definition and Origin of Personas

A persona is a fictional representation of a typical user segment, based on real and detailed data. The persona technique was popularized by Alan Cooper in the 1990s and is now widely used in product and service design. Personas are created to help design teams envision the needs and behaviors of a typical user, using demographic and psychographic data.

How to Create Effective Personas?

Creating personas involves several key steps. First, identify and collect data on existing or potential users. Tools like surveys, interviews, and data analysis help create the most realistic personas possible. Next, analyze this data to identify patterns and trends. Finally, develop a precise and vivid description of each persona, including information such as habits, motivations, and challenges faced.

Today, artificial intelligence, especially through tools like EdenPersona, makes this process much easier. It creates your persona with a click. However, providing the AI with accurate information remains essential, especially when your business has a history that can provide on-the-ground insights.

Why Do Companies Use Personas?

Companies use personas for several reasons. First, personas help better understand user needs and guide the product or service design process. Second, they help align internal teams by providing a common vision of the target user. Finally, personas are also used to test concepts and ensure that developed products meet user expectations.

How Can Relying on Personas Lead to Mistakes?

Cognitive Limits of Personas

Personas can easily fall into cognitive traps that limit their usefulness. For instance, unrealistic or simplistic scenarios can fail to account for the diversity and complexity of real users. Moreover, information overload can confuse the design team, making it difficult to make informed decisions.

Biases in Creating Personas

Biases, whether conscious or unconscious, can significantly affect the accuracy of personas. It's common for creators to project their own beliefs and values onto the personas, leading to errors. Using partial or misinterpreted data can also result in incorrect personifications of the target audience.

Examples of Bad Practices with Personas

There are several examples of bad practices in using personas. One of them is creating overly stereotyped personas, which can lead to products or services poorly suited to the diversity of users. Additionally, failing to update personas regularly can make them obsolete, resulting in design decisions based on outdated information.

What Are the Main Dangers of Using Personas?

Risk of User Stereotyping

One of the major dangers of using personas is stereotyping. When personas are overly simplified, they risk reducing the user to a caricature, ignoring human nuances and diversity. This stereotyping can lead to products and services that do not genuinely meet the varied needs of the real market.

Providing specific insights from your best prospects or customers will allow artificial intelligence to create a more nuanced and realistic portrait. Conversely, giving preconceived notions about the target customer, information not based on data and facts but only on personal beliefs, can result in a biased persona.

Over-Representation or Under-Representation of Certain Segments

Personas can also lead to over-representation or under-representation of certain user segments. Sometimes, excessive attention to specific personas can cause other important segments to be neglected, which can greatly harm the overall effectiveness of the marketing strategy.

Unrealistic Expectations from Personas

It is common for teams to have unrealistic expectations from personas, seeing them as a magic solution capable of solving all problems. However, personas cannot capture all human variability and should be used with caution. Expectations related to personas must be adjusted to reflect their limited role in the design process.

Indeed, with AI advancements and EdenPersona, we can take the relationship with personas much further. You can interact with your persona, present projects and issues to them. But human emotions remain subtle. These functionalities help for a first approach but do not replace the need to confront this with reality.

In the end, isn't the customer always right?

How to Regularly Update and Manage Personas?

Process for Re-evaluating Personas

To maintain the relevance of personas, it is essential to re-evaluate them regularly. This process should include reviewing new data, considering user feedback, and adjusting personas accordingly. The re-evaluation process should be systematic and well-integrated into the product lifecycle.

Thus, edit your EdenPersona profiles to reflect these changes: a persona remains alive and evolving.

Tools and Methodologies for Updating

There are several tools and methodologies for updating personas. Periodic surveys, continuous data analysis, and direct user feedback can provide valuable information. EdenPersona allows centralization and consultation of personas, also considering the persona's stage in the user journey.

When and Why to Adjust a Persona?

Adjusting a persona is essential when there are significant changes in user demographics or behavior. The introduction of a new product or service may also justify a revision of personas to ensure they still reflect market reality.

In a company, two very similar products can have different personas. For instance, is a child who loves chocolate ice cream the same as an adult who prefers coffee-flavored ice cream? Probably not!

That's why EdenPersona also allows creating different personas for different products.

Adjustments should be based on recent and reliable data to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Is Relying on Personas Always Effective?

Expected Benefits vs Reality

Although personas are intended to improve user understanding and guide the design process effectively, reality can sometimes diverge from expectations. Personas may not always capture the full complexity of user needs, leading to strategies that ultimately are not as effective as anticipated.

It is crucial to measure results and regularly ensure the persona remains a close portrait of the average best customers. Even check if there are, in fact, two or three distinct representative profiles for the same product. For example, an iPad can be used by a university student seeking efficiency and practicality as well as by a senior executive needing performance and flexibility, each having very different sociodemographic and psychological profiles but equally relevant.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Personas?

Measuring the effectiveness of personas can be done through several indicators. The success of products or services in the market is a good indicator of the alignment of personas with real needs. User feedback and website conversion rates can also be used to continuously evaluate the relevance of personas.

Finally, never be out of touch! Stay actively and regularly tuned to your customers. If you no longer recognize your personas in the words, actions, and profiles of the average best real customers, it's time to adjust.