Marketing matches the benefits of my product with the needs of my customer.  The question is: who is my customer?  What is her role in her company, what are her professional aspirations, how does she communicate with others in the company and what kind of a problem solver is she?  The better I can answer these and other related questions, the more successful I will be at developing my product and showing her how its benefits can meet her needs.

One of the most memorable exercises I undertake with my marketing students, usually in the very first lecture, involves several pairs of scissors, a pile of colorful newspapers, and a healthy portion of imagination.  Half of the students are instructed to cut out ads, define the product or service offering and its benefits.  The other group goes about finding pictures of interesting people and pastes those images next to a vivid description of what they imagine that person to be.  The more detail, the better.  And it always certainly includes a name and a face.

Picture a Persona

Derived from the Latin word for "mask" or "character", persona refers to a fictitious description of a person.  The development of personas for marketing purposes is relatively wide spread according to a 2006 research paper by MarketingSherpa.  For example, it states that 40% of business technology hardware marketers use personas for their marketing.  Best Buy went through it to improve its in-store experience, and SAP did the same while designing its call center software.  How these companies create personas and communicate their identities internally varies, but the results are the same: they are better able to understand abstract customer data if they can picture it, and picture it with a face.  Humans empathize with humans.  And we tend to think in pictures.

Pareto Principle and Marketing to Personas

Can we justify marketing to just one or two personas when we know our customer base is made up of a large variety of persons?  Are we excluding the rest, or even prejudging our customers before we meet them?

Focus is the key, and the Pareto Principle can be used as justification.  Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, it states that 20% of our effort will likely result in 80% of our rewards, i.e. 80% of sales will come from 20% of our clients.  The better we understand the top 2 of our 10 client types, the more successfully we can market to them.