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

Foreword

Back in 2007, I gushed enthusiastically on my blog about the GoPro digital camera, which I had purchased to take photos and videos while surfing. I was a very early adopter (the digital version had been out only a month).

The clever marketers at GoPro focused on creating cameras that address the specific problems faced by consumers, in my case a camera I could take surfing. Not long after my original post, I interviewed Nick Woodman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GoPro, who told me how his company makes decisions. “Our solutions could never evolve from a boardroom discussion,” he told me. “We go straight to the source. We don't ask our grandmother what she thinks about our motorsport mounts apparatus; we ask race car drivers.”

Although he didn't call what he was doing buyer persona research, Nick leads a company that builds product and marketing strategies using the ideas that you'll read about in these pages.

So how is GoPro doing now, seven years after the first digital camera was launched and I first wrote about the company? Sales have doubled every year, with the company reporting $279 million in revenue for the three months ending September 30, 2014. This rapid growth allowed GoPro to go public on the stock market in 2014. From zero revenue to a billion dollars a year in less than a decade! As I write this, the company has a market capitalization of $10 billion, making Nick a billionaire. GoPro has left its competitors in the dust through an intense ...