What makes a persona truly useful? (Also, is one persona enough for a multi-stakeholder project?)

When I started in advertising, I used to love the idea of personas. Personas simplified complexity. Because personas clarified ‘who’ we were talking to/targeting, they forced us to make important choices about ‘what’ we we wanted to say in our ads. This helped us in prioritizing our messages and articulating our desired outcomes. There was just one problem, most of these personas were based on traditional qualitative research, such as one-on-one interviews and focus group discussions. While many personas that were based on qualitative research were useful, all of them were not. This is because not qualitative research yields deep insights. Over the years I’ve realized that while there are some very smart qualitative researchers who are really good at what they do there an equal number, if not more, who are not. This, at least, has been my experience working with qualitative researchers in marketing. Personas built on mediocre qualitative research just don’t cut it. They checks all the boxes, but seldom give clear direction to what needs to be designed and to what affect. Such Personas end up becoming a collection of “generic descriptions” and “claimed behaviors and attitudes,” which do not represent underlying consumer reality.

Here’s an example of how this impacted our work. A few years back, I was working on a leading global enterprise technology client. Year after year, their brand tracking study showed that the brand had high awareness, high brand recall and top intention to purchase among all competitors. However, in spite of this, the brand kept losing market share. Not just in the US, but globally. We realized we needed a way to cross examine our qualitative consumer data and the personas we were working with. This made us reconsider our approach.

Enter behavioral data. Behavioral data (for all its limitations in terms of answering the ‘why’ of consumer behavior) can be a great way to cross examine findings from claimed behavior and attitudes generated by qualitative research.  Personas that are based on a combination of qualitative data (small data?) and behavioral data (big data) about the same target audience can truly represent what is going in a person’s life. Personas built on a combination of qualitative research and behavioral data are more nuanced and thus more reliable than those created only from qualitative research. Such personas help in answering nuanced questions like, “what experience are people looking for” and “what behavior are we wanting to change,” among others. A persona that does not answer these questions is not actionable and thus a wasted opportunity.

For our project (“Revitalizing Forgotten spaces in LA” and starting with LA River by developing an LA River Garden) there are multiple stakeholders and audiences. Thus, we have penned multiple personas. It may be noted that these personas are based only on qualitative data collected via informal interactions. In that sense, these personas are not as accurate as they could’ve been had we also had access to behavioral data.

Detailed personas and scenarios for our project are outlined here.