Many marketing people are enthusiastic about Personas. The basic problem of personas is that almost all sales (your sales, the sales of the product class) come from buyers who are not really anything like the Personas.
Take this example from something I read yesterday.
” ….. a health foods company targets moms with college degrees who are health conscious, but they create a strategy for Molly, who is 36, married with two children, has a Master’s Degree, earns six figures, loves to run and only buys organic food for her family.
As the CMO, I would be much more confident targeting the Mollys of the world with a message that our foods are healthy for both her and her family. And although they’re organic and cost more than non-organic foods, she can rest easy knowing that what she (and her family) put in their bodies is good for them. And you can’t put a price on that. “
OK, you’re a health foods company. Your first mistake would be to think buyers have to be into healthy lifestyles to buy health foods. That’d be at least worth checking – I’d put money on the fact lots of not-particularly health-conscious people buy healthy or organic cereal etc. at least sometimes. Your second mistake would be to think the buyers of your product have really sharply defined things in common – moms with college degrees? Really – so single men, moms without college, women without children or with adult children don’t buy health foods?
The third mistake is to double down on your initial errors and think your strategy should be to target a ridiculously tight persona – 36 years old (not 30, not 35 even – and not even 30 to 40 which would still be unnecessarily restrictive); married with two children, not one or three or none; Master’s degree – why is this needed? Six figure income – why? Loves to run – why? Going to the gym, or playing sport isn’t good enough, Molly has to love to run and ONLY buy organic food. This description would match perhaps one in fifty thousand households if you were lucky. So following this strategy would mean you ignore 99.9+ percent of people. The final flaw is thinking you could actually find and selectively target & reach such people anyway.
Marketers like the idea of personas because they seemingly make the job of dreaming up content easier – “what would Molly like?”. But you run the real danger of creating irrelevant content / ad creative and trying to only talk to a minority – because Molly only exists in your imagination, and 99%+ of people buying the category you compete in are not like Molly.