Buyer Personas, Revised and Expanded, 2nd Edition

3Decide How You Will Discover Buyer Persona Insights

If, as philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “Life is the sum of all your choices,” it is marketing's goal to better understand how those choices are made. Decoding and influencing decision-making lie at the core of all marketing efforts.

Yet marketing is only one of several professions that want to know how people choose one option over another. Responding to the need, countless psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have written books and papers that attempt to decode the “who, what, how, and why” of decision-making in its many permutations. Market researchers deploy a variety of “qualitative” and “quantitative” methodologies to understand a buyer's mindset and behaviors as they make purchase decisions. And now, as we walk through our days with Internet-connected devices and the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), a new generation of data scientists are building complex algorithms that promise to glean meaningful insight from our digital footprints. It is dizzying to consider what all of these approaches might someday reveal or how future innovations will affect our lives.

Lacking a crystal ball and humbled by the potential for rapid change, in this chapter, we hope to simplify this topic, providing practical guidance that any marketer, regardless of budget, can employ to gain insights into their customer's buying decisions and the people who make them.

A Straightforward Approach to a Complex ...