What is it for?

The Customer Persona is a description of a company’s typical target customer. It is very common for companies to make one or more personas of their customers, as it makes it easier to understanding your customers, and to discuss them with others in the company. Personas are not only used in marketing, but also in app and website development, user interface design, and event planning.

How do you use it?

When you create a persona, you try to define your target customer as a single person. Normally this includes giving the customer a specific age, a gender, and even a name. This forces the marketer to think about their target customer narrowly, which is beneficial in later stages of the strategy process.

Some companies may have multiple personas. For example, and airline may have separate personas for economy and business travellers. It is important that these personas are clearly distinctive, in terms of their motivations for buying your product, and their characteristics.

When you create a persona for the first time, you do it mostly based on assumptions who your target customer will be. However, it is common for the persona to change as your business starts taking off and you interact with your real customers.

There are hundreds of personas online, all with different designs and different components. However, the following are normally present:

• Demographic data: name, age, gender, profession, education level.

• Short bio: their personality, lifestyle, education, career, and relationships. This often includes a single photo.

• Behaviors: How they use the product, media usage, shopping behavior, others who influence their purchase, and preferred communication methods.

• Benefits or motivations: the reason why they purchase the product and what they are looking for.

• Frustrations or challenges: what they don’t like about competing products.

It is common for customers personas to have a professional, colorful design, on a single slide. This is because it is a document that is used and shared often between marketers and other employees.

How do you teach it?

Being able to make a customer persona is a critical skill for marketers. Personas can be created for existing companies, fictional ones (for example from a case study), or for business ideas. A persona may be created as a stand-alone assignment, or part of a

I normally instruct my students to first write down 12-15 characteristics that they want to include in their persona (including name, age and gender). Next, I ask them to create a persona on a single PowerPoint slide.

This is not a hard assignment, but there are a few things that occasionally come up:

• Many customer personas that are available online allow for an age range, for example 30-35 years old. However, I always instruct my students to come up with a single age (e.g. 33). This forces them to think about their target customer narrowly.

• Some students try to describe the perpect customer, rather than a typical customer. For example, as a persona for a fitness club they may describe an influencer who is popular on Instagram. This is a bad idea, since most customers are not like that. A persona can be a little bit aspirational (i.e. what kind of customer are you trying to attract?), but it needs to represent a high enough percentage of your customer base to be useful.

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