Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

1Understand Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them

The launch of Apple's iPhone in January 2007 is now widely recognized as a pivotal moment in the history of digital technology and consumer culture. When it went on sale later that year, customers in the United States and parts of Europe greeted the iPhone with near rapture.

A few months later, during the summer of 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G in a total of 22 countries. But what happened to the iPhone in technology-obsessed Japan is a classic lesson in the importance of deeply understanding the expectations of buyers.

Incredibly, Apple hadn't considered that buyers in the Japanese market might have different needs from U.S. and European buyers. And the results were compelling.

Although demand for the iPhone exceeded supply in many other parts of the world, in Japan the iPhone 3G was gathering dust on store shelves by the close of 2008. Press reports the following spring indicated that Japanese sales of the iPhone were only 200,000 units, primarily to existing users of Apple computers and laptops. This was a country where an estimated 50 million cell phones had been sold the previous year.

With a minimum of research, Apple could have discovered that by 2008 the Japanese were accustomed to using their personal phones to shoot videos and to watch digital TV programs. Yet the iPhone 3G didn't even include a video camera. What's more, Apple could have anticipated the difficulty competing in a market where many phones ...