Chapter 5
Creating Customer Personas
In This Chapter
Applying personas in product development
Identifying sources of data to build a persona
Turning data into a persona
Personas are fictional customers based on real data obtained from customer segmentation analyses, ethnographic research, surveys, and interviews.
The purpose of a persona is to better focus product development and marketing efforts on real customer needs and goals rather than just abstract demographics. To make personas more realistic, they get names like “Marcus” or “Shannon” and have pictures or can even be life-sized cardboard cutouts.
While the people and pictures can be fictional, the details should be factual: Their goals and characteristics should represent the real needs of a larger group of customers.
In this chapter, I discuss the ways personas can help product development and marketing efforts for an organization. I walk you step by step through the persona creation process with examples and show you how they can answer important questions.
Recognizing the Importance of Personas
When you’re busy developing a product, it’s easy to start wondering what a hypothetical customer could want to do and build ...
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