Rethinking Client Personas (3 reasons to burn yours)
Client/Customer Personas and building a more effective brand have almost become synonymous. You can’t have one without the other. But if you’re a small business owner, personas are actually doing more harm than good.
Personas are a great activity. They have a definite beginning, middle and end, make brand nerds like me look cool and provide a concrete thing for business owners to ooh and ahh over.
They’re just useless, possibly harmful, deliverables.
That’s all.
These are just 3 of the reasons why:
1) As a business owner you won’t actually use the info
This is a targeting tool for marketers, brand scientists and other folks of our ilk like ad strategists. It’s a great tool for us, but less so for you. If someone dumps a shiny profile in front of you as part of your deliverable, personally I’d start to have doubts*. I mean after all, what exactly will you, a founder, do with that aggressively detailed reporting of your customer’s seltzer preferences?
2) They create blindspots, which is bad if you care about your impact on the world
I heard a story once about a business that opened up a mobile pay only restaurant in a Brooklyn analog somewhere in the contiguous United States. Their ideal client avatar was delighted! The folks who actually lived in the community they had placed themselves in? Not so much. Many of them didn’t have smartphones with the requisite tech. Moral of the story? There’s a whole spectrum of people your work is affecting that you’re not even aware of.
You can only profile who you’re aware of.
3) If you’re from a historically underestimated community, customer personas lull you into a false sense of security
I think it’s no surprise that the world is full of bias, no? We already know, for example, that Black Americans are 33% more likely to be overlooked by their white peers. No amount of customer personas is going to overcome that Racial Attention Deficit. You know what might? Understanding what drives even one of the five other key stakeholders you *need* to keep an eye on if you plan to overcome the Invisibility Tax.
In the case of historically underestimated persons, the most overlooked stakeholder is the gatekeeper.
Here’s what you should do instead:
Stakeholder Spectrums. If you want to avoid these three pitfalls and the dozens of others I haven’t even mentioned here, you’ll want your thought partner to present you with a stakeholder spectrum or three by the end of your work together.
A Stakeholder Spectrum presents a spectrum, say from most receptive to least receptive, and asks, who lives at the key points on this spectrum and why?
At NobiWorks, we give each spectrum three key points: Most, Mid and Least. This way, our clients walk away with a clearer picture of who their key stakeholders are, what motivates them and if any of those key stakeholders have been conditioned to ignore them (or, if they have been conditioned to ignore any of them).
*If they tell you the profile is not for you, but for your future marketing person, then they are forgiven.
P.S. If you suspect there are some hidden stakeholders you need to discover, grab our Stakeholder guide