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

2Focus on the Insights That Guide Marketing Decisions

“Eureka!”

For more than two millennia, that single word has been associated with the most celebrated “aha!” moment in history. It was the shout spoken by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes as he jumped from his bathtub and excitedly ran naked through the streets of Syracuse. Archimedes had just realized that he could calculate the volume of an irregular object by measuring how much water it displaced.

Whether the citizens of Syracuse found this public display anything out of the ordinary is lost to history, but the story makes it clear that a moment of insight is worth celebrating.

By comparison, knowledge is merely interesting. You read a book or attend a class and often learn something that you will soon forget. And then suddenly, an encounter as ordinary as Archimedes's daily bath produces a new insight, a fantastic moment when all of the pieces of a once inscrutable puzzle fall into place. If you have experienced these flashes of insight, we don't need to explain their power to motivate and inspire.

Perhaps you are attending a conference at which a keynote speaker clarifies a problem you have contemplated at length. You suddenly see how you could take a different approach and attain a goal that was critical to your company. Thrilled with your discovery, you turn to the colleague seated next to you, fully expecting his smile to match your own. Instead, he is preoccupied with his phone. When you have a chance to ...