Buyer Personas

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

Adele Revella

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118961667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Named one of Fortune Magazine's "5 Best Business Books" in 2015 See your offering through the buyer's eyes for more effective marketing

Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes. Readers will learn how to segment their customer base, investigate each customer type, and apply a radically more relevant process of message selection, content creation, and distribution through the channels that earn the buyers' trust. Rather than relying on generic data or guesswork to determine what the buyer wants, the buyer persona approach allows companies to ask the buyer directly and obtain more precise and actionable guidance.

Buyer personas are composite pictures of the people who buy solutions, services or products, crafted through a unique type of interview with the people the marketer wants to influence. This book provides step-by-step guidance toward implementing the buyer persona approach, with the advice of an internationally-respected expert.

• Learn who buys what, and why
• Understand your buyer's goals and how you can address them
• Tailor your marketing activities to your buyer's expectations
• See the purchase through the customer's eyes

A recent services industry survey reports that 52 percent of their marketers have buyer personas, and another 28 percent expect to add them within the next two years – but only 14.6 percent know how to use them. To avoid letting such a valuable tool go to waste, access the expert perspective in Buyer Personas, and craft a more relevant marketing strategy.

Part I
Understanding the Art and Science of Buyer Personas

1
Understand Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them

The launch of Apple's iPhone in January 2007 is now widely recognized as a pivotal moment in the history of digital technology and consumer culture. When it went on sale later that year, customers in the United States and parts of Europe greeted the iPhone with near rapture.

A few months later, during the summer of 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G in a total of 22 countries. But what happened to the iPhone in technology-obsessed Japan is a classic lesson in the importance of deeply understanding the expectations of buyers.

Incredibly, Apple hadn't considered that buyers in the Japanese market might have different needs from U.S. and European buyers. And the results were compelling.

Although demand for the iPhone exceeded supply in many other parts of the world, in Japan the iPhone 3G was gathering dust on store shelves by the close of 2008. Press reports the following spring indicated that Japanese sales of the iPhone were only 200,000 units, primarily to existing users of Apple computers and laptops. This was a country where an estimated 50 million cell phones had been sold the previous year.

With a minimum of research, Apple could have discovered that by 2008 the Japanese were accustomed to using their personal phones to shoot videos and to watch digital TV programs. Yet the iPhone 3G didn't even include a video camera. What's more, Apple could have anticipated the difficulty competing in a market where many phones routinely included chips for debit card transactions and train passes. After all, Japan is a place where trains are a part of daily life, and credit cards are rarely accepted. Debit transactions are the primary currency.

To compound the situation, the iPhone was also more expensive than its competitors in Japan. Perhaps Apple thought that its online software store would be valuable enough to justify the higher price. If only the company had known that its target buyers were reluctant to shop online in 2008.

This was nearly the end of the story for the iPhone in Japan. “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them,” Steve Jobs boldly proclaimed to Businessweek in an interview a decade earlier. Having seen the iPhone 3G, the Japanese market had shown Apple's brilliant visionary CEO what they didn't want, as well as the dangers of relying exclusively on intuition and past success as a marketing strategy.

Luckily, Apple learned its lesson. Four years later Forbes reported that the iPhone 5s had captured 34 percent of the Japanese smartphone market, in a country now widely considered as the world's most sophisticated, advanced, and competitive marketplace for smartphones.

The dramatic difference this time: Apple was keenly aware of what its Japanese buyers were expecting.

Apple is fortunate to be that rare brand with the resources to recover from such a stumble. Nonetheless, it would have been far less costly in terms of time, expense, labor, and brand reputation for Apple to have interviewed Japanese buyers about their smartphone expectations before this launch.

Why the “Know Your Customer” Rule Has Been Redefined

The story of Apple's iPhone launch in Japan reminds us that even the most admired companies cannot avoid one of the most basic rules of business: Know your customer.

Now that customers are choosing how and when they will engage with your sales and marketing efforts, this timeless truth is gaining new urgency, forcing companies to reconsider their approach to discovering and applying customer insight.

In 2012, the Corporate Executive Board's (CEB) Marketing Leadership Council released a widely cited study that concisely defined the problem, revealing that on average, business-to-business (B2B) customers are nearly 60 percent of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a sales representative. There is compelling evidence that customers of business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are equally likely to rely on peers and digital connections to guide their decisions about what to buy and which supplier they should trust.

We know that the 60 percent statistic cited in the CEB study is not universally applicable, but the trend is unmistakable—customers who have the resources and networks to make buying decisions without your input are happy to do so.

---

Armed with instant access to countless peer-reviewed options, customers are holding your sales and marketing teams to a new standard: Tell me what I want to know and help me find the right option at every stage of my buying decision, or I'll go somewhere else.

---

This change in customer decision making is a game changer for companies that have always relied on their salespeople to listen to each buyer's needs and create a winning argument, one customer at a time, while marketers stayed inside the building, churning out marketing materials and running campaigns that were based on a good deal of supposition about what their customers wanted to hear. If we start with the principle that effective communication requires good listening, it's easy to see that marketers have been working with a severe and illogical handicap.

Although the details about buyer personas are unclear to many, their goal is simple. Marketers must understand how markets full of buyers navigate the buying decision they want to influence so that they can become a useful, trusted resource throughout that decision. Marketers need to become good listeners if they want to be effective communicators.

A Clothes Dryer's Extra Setting Made All the Difference

Beko, a Turkish manufacturer of major household consumer appliances, took a very different tack than the Apple team that launched the iPhone 4 in Japan. They prepared for a launch into the lucrative and unfamiliar Chinese market by listening to buyers of electric clothes dryers.

According to David Meerman Scott, who visited with Beko executives in Istanbul in 2014, Beko staffers routinely conduct in-depth interviews with potential customers before introducing an appliance in any international market. In the course of their conversations with buyers in China, Beko marketers learned that many people hold fast to a cultural tradition that uses direct sunlight to dry clothes. Some Chinese believe there is a spiritual component when garments are exposed to the sun. So rather than throw in the towel (so to speak), Beko dryers were built with a setting that stops the drying cycle when it is only half done. Now Beko consumers can partially dry their wet laundry and then hang the slightly damp clothing in the sunlight.

Scott reports that the new Beko dryers are just one of their appliances that are selling very well in the Chinese market. Chinese buyer interviews led Beko to design a refrigerator that is very different from those routinely sold in Western countries. As almost everyone knows, rice is part of the daily Chinese diet. Without the research, however, Beko might not have known that their buyers wanted a refrigerator that could store rice at low humidity and a temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, a setting that's too warm for conventional refrigerated food. So Beko's Chinese model has three doors instead of the familiar two, each with separate temperature and humidity controls. Scott reported that “at the 2013 IFA Fair, the world's leading trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances, this Beko refrigerator won a coveted innovation award.”

Luckily, most marketers don't have to confront cultural factors as unusual as those that affected the introduction of Apple and Beko's products in Asia. But the essential concern—the importance of focusing on the concerns and expectations of your buyers—remains a crucial issue for all marketers, even those whose buyers live right next door. And admittedly, for many marketers their buyers' mind-sets can be as mysterious as the customs of citizens living in a foreign country.

It wasn't necessary for Apple and Beko to engage the methodology behind building buyer personas to avoid stumbling in their new markets. Some basic old-fashioned consumer market research was involved. But the fact that Beko undertook a concerted effort to interview their prospective Chinese customers demonstrates the wisdom of a disciplined approach to gathering insights into buyer expectations.

Will You Understand Your Buyers' Decisions?

Most buying decisions are not as easily understood as those in the Apple iPhone and Beko examples. Many buying decisions are far more complex, involving many variables and multiple influencers or decision makers. Geographic distinctions may or may not alter the buyer's approach to the decision. And product design modifications are an uncommon result of building buyer personas.

However, the most crucial aspect of buyer personas applies to each of these stories: The companies involved needed to listen to their buyers tell a story about a considered decision.

We will explore other circumstances and approaches in Chapter 3, but the most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence. Unfortunately, many marketers don't realize that hearing and relating their customer's story is the foundation of understanding them as a buyer. So it's essential to clearly define what a buyer persona is—and what it is not.

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

Figure 1.1 Example Buyer Profile

Here we see Jim, a fictional archetype who is meant to represent a typical operations manager. The graphic outline gives us information about Jim'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 sources.

What does this tell us about how Jim makes a buying decision? We see he reads industry publications, belongs to industry trade groups, and uses the Internet when searching for solutions. Alas, the same could be said for about 99 percent of other business professionals working at a comparable managerial level.

Let's say Jim is looking for a new logistics management supplier. From this template, what do we know about what's motivating Jim to find a new supplier? What does he expect to be different once he makes this switch? What is very important to Jim about the appearance of the packaging and enclosures in the shipments sent to retailers? What does Jim dislike about a lot of the providers he has used in the past?

Marketers hoping to interest Jim in their logistics services using his Buyer Profile template won't find much useful intelligence here. Instead they would need to use this profile to imagine (guess?) how Jim would respond to their messaging when sitting at his desk.

It's difficult to imagine how this approach to buyer personas will help marketers of logistics solutions know what they need to do to help Jim see their solution as a perfect fit for his needs. Furthermore, it is unlikely that this company's marketers will use this tool to persuade their internal stakeholders that a different approach to their messaging and marketing activities will set their merchandise or services apart from their competition.

Buyer Profiles will not transform this marketer's ability to think like Jim. But suppose you knew what Jim is looking for when he is considering signing a contract with a new provider, why he has been dissatisfied with other providers in the past, ...