It is crucial to clearly distinguish between persona and real customers to create successful business strategies. A persona is an imaginary character set up for marketing and product development, whereas real customers are the ones who actually use our products or services. Confusing these two concepts can lead to misguided strategies. Let’s explore why we shouldn’t mix up personas and real customers and how to differentiate between them.
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1. What is a Persona?
A persona is a fictional character representing a specific customer segment. It is created with detailed attributes such as name, gender, age, occupation, and lifestyle to be used in marketing, planning, and design. Personas are very useful tools for developing marketing strategies. However, having a perfect persona does not mean it will match real customers.
2. Why Persona Setting is Not Sufficient
Personas can have limitations in several ways.
- Possibility of Misconception: There can be a misconception that a few specific personas can represent the entire customer base.
- Bias in Interpretation: User test results can be biased to prove that the persona is correctly set.
- Subjective Interpretation: There is a possibility of different interpretations when explaining it externally.
3. Differences Between Persona and Customers
- Difference in Purpose: A persona is a tool that creates a fictional representative customer to analyze their characteristics, personalities, and behavior patterns for marketing strategies. In contrast, a customer is a real consumer who actually uses the product or service.
- Generalization vs. Specificity: Personas are fictional characters with general characteristics representing various customer segments. However, real customers have unique and specific needs and experiences.
- Strategy vs. Execution: Personas are used in the strategy development stage to guide marketing and product development. In contrast, customers are associated with real experiences that occur while using the specific service or product.
- Simplification for Convenience vs. Realistic Understanding: Personas simplify the characteristics of a specific group to make understanding easier. However, real customers are people with diverse characteristics and complex experiences.
4. Approaches to Understanding Customers
To identify who the customers are, consider the following questions:
- Who uses this product?
- Do corporations or organizations use this product?
- What value is the user trying to achieve?
- Can the product directly provide that value?
- Can you prove with data that it has been successfully provided?
- Can you group users pursuing the same value?
These questions help you understand the needs and values of customers and formulate strategies based on that understanding. It is also important to meet with customers directly and get feedback. By formulating strategies that reflect the needs and experiences of real customers, the chances of success in the market increase.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is important to clearly distinguish between persona and real customers and to formulate business strategies accordingly. Use personas as tools for strategy development and take a realistic approach based on feedback and data from real customers.