Buyer Personas, Revised and Expanded, 2nd Edition

1Understanding Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them

In some marketing courses and websites, Buyer Personas are defined as something similar to Figure 1.1.

Here we see John, a fictional archetype who is meant to represent a typical Operations Manager. The graphic outline gives us information about John's education, age, to whom he reports, his skills, the incentives and rewards from his job (keeping his job and an occasional raise), and how he spends his free time (family, church, a weekly poker game with his friends); plus, how he stays current on the latest trends in his industry, broken down into four categories. This is a Buyer Profile that is heavy on data that could be readily gleaned from online research, social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and other sources.

The Buyer Profile has gained a lot of traction because it is a useful tool to help you think about your target buyers as real people, with actual families, typical bosses, and human concerns. For the same reason that we find it far easier to communicate via social media when we have a photograph of a person we have never met in person, the Buyer Profile creates a sense of the human connection with people whom we have never met face-to-face. If you've ever built a relationship with someone through social media, you may have noticed that your first in-person encounter feels a lot like running into an old friend. The photograph and details of this person's job or personal life have likely shaped your ...