Personas 2.0: Finding the Connection

1. LITMUS
Personas 2.0
Finding the Connection
Open. It’s not just the sign on a retail shop door—it’s an imperative and a state of
mind for consumers. The successful open brand must operate under a new set of
rules, embracing social web-empowered consumers and their impact on the digital
landscape, on brands and on each other.
Who is this new social web-empowered consumer? They represent 86% of the
online population and are defined by their online behaviors and motivations. In
addition to the three core behaviors of shopping, researching and self-servicing,
three new social behaviors have emerged—creating, sharing and influencing.
She is social. She is empowered. She has the ability to activate and amplify a
viral campaign. She can be a brand unto herself. In collaboration with her online
community, she is creating a paradigm shift. She’s taking the power of brand
messaging into her own hands.
Today’s consumer isn’t necessarily more complex. The difference is that we now
have far more information about her, allowing us to create more compelling and
relevant experiences and thus increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and profits.
A key to unlocking the social web-empowered consumer is to create personas 2.0,
which incorporate attitudes and expectations within the context of the social web
to your brand.
What is a persona?
Let’s start with what a persona is not. A persona is not a segment. It is not a
profile and it is not a representation of a single customer. A persona is a tool that
puts a human face on data, allowing everyone to share a common, documented
understanding of consumers—to see them as knowable and real. It is an archetype
that represents groups of consumers with common attitudes, motivations, goals
and actions. A successful persona paints a picture of the consumer’s life and
illustrates who she is, providing an opportunity for empathy for the consumer and
her relationship to the brand. Personas are a tool that can unify stakeholders across
an organization, allowing everyone to know their customers and to make more
informed decisions. Personas are an easy way to infuse your customer into the
business day-to-day operations and decisions.
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2. Personas 1.0
Personas 1.0 were created and used by brands with the fortitude to put the
customer at the center of their experience design processes. More than likely, they
include transactional information as well as information extending beyond basic
demographics and perhaps psychographics to understand customers’ needs and
desires to research, shop and self service.
If your personas were created prior to the emergence of the social web and
the importance of communities, they likely do not include the social aspects of
emerging behaviors and expectations of this web-empowered consumer.
Personas 2.0
Personas 2.0 incorporate the social web-empowered consumer. They consider the
consumer’s individual goals as well as their role within open brand stewardship.
These evolved personas aid in understanding the relationship between the
consumer, community and the brand—something we call the Love Triangle.
CONSUMER COMMUNITY
SHARED
PASSION
The Love Triangle
BRAND
Personas 2.0 must include the implications of the ever-changing digital landscape
and the role of the digital channel within the consumer’s world—her ability to be
a producer, an author and a change agent, as well as a customer. Consumers do
not draw a discerning distinction between activities—shopping, entertainment,
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3. research, networking. The social web-empowered consumer expects portability and
a seamless experience—allowing her to pause and play across a variety of activities
in any channel.
Personas 2.0 will provide insight into how your personas will interact, either one-to-
one or within a network.
How do I create a persona?
An organization should begin by defining how they want to use personas. It’s
important to engage business stakeholders across the organization (marketing,
merchandising, IT, operations) at this stage, as well as throughout the persona
development process. Next, gather all your customer research and data (CRM, sales
data, web analytics, etc). Now it’s time to perform an analysis to determine what, if
any, additional information is needed. It’s important to capture answers to these questions:
O What motivates your consumers?
O What are your consumers’ attitudes and preferences?
O What are your consumers’ goals?
O What are your consumers’ actions/behaviors?
To gather this information, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative
methods to capture both aided and unaided information about your consumers.
The research should include methodologies that will capture attitudes and
motivations within the social web.
To add another layer of rigor it’s possible to gain a more complete consumer picture
by layering consumers’ profitability in with their behaviors and attitudes. The result,
called a holistic segmentation, can help brands select the personas that will drive
business results in a more tangible way, and allows marketers to migrate consumer
behaviors more effectively.
Holistic Segmentation=
Once you’ve collected the necessary Behaviors + Attitudes + Profitability
data, it’s time for synthesis and persona
definition—a process that is centered
around informed clustering. Include
this rule of thumb in your formula
Profitability
Consumer
for persona development: Personas
should be mutually exclusive and
distinguishable to drive business
decision-making that could define
user interface design, online campaign Be
Se hav l
developments, fuel information gm io ina
en ral i tud nts
architecture and prioritize features.
ts Att me
Seg
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4. After the personas have been defined, collaborate to determine how many and
which personas to prioritize and visualize. Then partner with your creative team—
including designers and copywriters—to visualize the personas.
The following example of a persona 2.0 is Sarah—a social shopper— that includes
a view of her basic profile information, a quote which embodies her feeling about
The Acme Apparel Co, a brief narrative that helps her audience understand her
expectations and goals. The component that allows Acme in this example to
understand Sarah as a web-empowered consumer is her core value of Interaction
and the three experience components of shared world, inner world and the
brand world. The world metaphors translate the Love Triangle, which provides
Acme a view of how Sarah is as an individual, as a part of the community and her
relationship (actual or desired) to Acme as a brand.
Persona 2.0
example of Sarah—
a social shopper
When and how should I use personas?
Creating personas is only one part of the work, applying them as an ongoing
decision support tool is most important. Once the personas are visualized, share
them and infuse them into everyday business conversations.
Because they are distinguishable and mutually exclusive, personas can be further
prioritized using weights that are driven from your business goals to help the
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5. organization focus on the most important personas. Personas can help you make
decisions across your business—targeting online marketing campaigns, prioritizing
IT project lists, modeling customer acquisition and acting as a creative lens for
designing and building brand communications. They are also a proven tool in the
experience design process as they fuel information architecture, user interface
design, content creation, use cases, and metrics reporting. Personas can also be
used to fuel strategic work—translating brand models, informing feature roadmaps
or influencing platform decisions.
Personas are an invaluable tool to build consensus within the decision process—but
they will not provide answers on their own. Personas help prevent brands from
talking to themselves or wasting time and dollars implementing features simply
because they are popular. Personas help unlock actionable insights that help brands
stay relevant so it is important to re-visit them and update them as your brand
makes significant change or the industry experiences a major shift.
Personas can help remove guesswork when you are faced with limited budget and/
or time and they support a greater rate of return on your web 2.0 investments as
well as helping you align your brand experience with her attitudes and goals.
Have customers? You should have personas.
Personas 1.0 are a great start. If you want to understand the dynamic of the social
web and mine opportunities for buzz, word of mouth, influence or advocacy,
Personas 2.0 are your next step. Ultimately, in order to know your consumer today,
you must also know her points of connection with her community.
If you don’t have the resources in-house to help you create personas, work with an
agency that has experience with persona creation. The investment will be realized
with the first application. If the values of consensus, commitment and humanizing
your data aren’t impressive enough, consider this very bottom-line value: companies
who use personas successfully have seen both revenue and conversion increase.
Staples, for example, is a brand that created seven personas. By zeroing in on the
most prevalent two in its site redesign, Staples saw its online revenue jump from $3
billion to $4.9 billion.
Fueled by the RI:LAB
The RI:Lab is the R&D arm of Resource Interactive. The Lab offers an innovation
mindset to make the future relevant to the here and now for our clients and their
teams. It isolates the trends swings and technological shifts that matter, and finds
at their intersection new, bold opportunities for consumer engagement and
competitive advantage, while providing consumer insights driven by research
and experience.
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6. About Resource Interactive
Resource Interactive is one of the nation’s preeminent digital marketing agencies,
helping Fortune 500 companies thrive in the evolving internet economy with
award-winning digital strategy, creative and technology solutions. Known for
its revolutionizing consumer insights, leading edge interactive design and
technological innovation, Resource Interactive is ranked among the top ten
independent interactive agencies in the nation.
Unique in the industry as female-founded, owned and operated, Resource
Interactive has grown over its 28-year history from its first marketing relationship
with Apple to ongoing partnerships with clients such as Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-
Packard, The Coca-Cola Company, Victoria’s Secret, Sherwin-Williams and L.L.
Bean, among others. For more information, visit www.resource.com.
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