Persona Psychology
Creating customer personas can help employees of a Company understand who is buying their products or services. And more importantly why they are buying it. Personas are a powerful tool for aligning teams and identifying specific types of customers and their needs.
Creating customer personas enables a Company’s online and offline sales & marketing personnel to focus their efforts on precise target audiences. They have a clear picture in their mind of who they want to influence, and what the right trigger points for action are.
Sales teams can also ensure that retailers and many other business partners have a deeper understanding of a brand’s customers for their product or service.
Having a clear view of a persona can also make sure that product innovation and enhancement is geared to the right target profile and their specific needs.
🤷🏻 What is a persona?
Personas are fictional profiles that represent key customer types, based on real data.
An entire customer base can be segmented into multiple personas. AI is proving to be a very useful tool to identify and predict the behaviour of certain groups of buyers/users. These groups can be the foundation of persona development.
In the past, personas were based largely on sales demographics and real-life observations about buyers. Traditional personas included details like gender, age, income, life-stage, job title, etc.
These data-based personas provided a good view of ‘who’ is buying, ‘what’ they would buy, and ‘when’ they would likely buy again.
But traditional personas lacked an understanding of ‘why’.
🧠 The need for psychological profiling.
To create fully rounded personas, we need to understand their psychology to reveal the underlying needs and motivations that drive behaviour.
Conducting consumer research to understand customer psychology makes a persona much more ‘real.’ We understand their values, beliefs and motivations.
We can then meld their psychology with demographics and other data to create a much clearer and more precise persona. A fully rounded picture of a person that everyone can comprehend and imagine.
When we understand how someone thinks and makes decisions, we can tailor our product and communications to address their needs.
It is often useful to give each persona a name, eg Escapists, Joy Seekers, Adventurers, etc. This brings to life the persona’s key reason why they buy your product and adds to the picture that we have in our minds of a specific persona.
We also have a much clearer understanding of how they are likely to react to a specific proposition.
Communications can therefore be much more effective because we know what to say to a specific persona and how to say it. We can more precisely address their psychological needs, trigger the right emotions, and impact behaviour in a way that benefits our brand.
When you understand not only who your customers are, but also why they behave the way they do, your marketing becomes more precise, authentic, and effective.
⚖️ Pros & Cons of ‘needs-based’ personas
When we have a fully rounded persona which has demographic, behavioural and psychological insights it provides a very clear picture of a buyer or potential buyer. This is particularly useful for innovation and new product development as we have a clear understanding of a persona’s needs and motivations. What they want and why.
Also, our sales and marketing teams are aligned. Everyone understands each persona: who is buying, what they are buying, and why they are buying.
The main issue with personas that have deep psychological insights is that media channels do not provide equivalent psychological data on their users. Channels and platforms have demographics and lots of other user data, but rarely, if ever, do they have psychological insights into their users.
Here is where AI and Machine Learning can help building algorithms to identify these deeper-rooted personas with correlating socio-demographic profiles.
Once you have identified the right channels per persona you have all that`s needed to win in today`s crowded marketplace. You will know WHO buys WHAT, WHEN, WHERE and WHY!
🤔 How many customer personas does your brand have?
👁️ Do you have a fully rounded picture of each persona with psychological insights?
🗣️ Are you clear about what, when and how to communicate with each persona?
If you answer no to any of these questions, contact us!