"A Series of Unfortunate Events." On ICAs and How they Deliver
Part 1 | Part 2 (You are here) | Part 3 | Part 4
You’re in part 2 of a series on the spectacular failures of Ideal Client Avatars (ICAs) and Client Personas. In part 1, I made a bold claim.
Ideal Client Avatars (ICAs) are garbage for 3 reasons.
They obscure insight
They don’t deliver the results they promise
They actually make the world a less equitable and more poisonous place.
The kicker? None of this is hyperbole. Read on to understand why
Delivering Results
If you don’t know all the stakeholders that are relevant to your success and you’re not equipped to gather intel that’s actually useful to the behavior change process, how on earth are you going to be able to glean the insights you need to deliver results?
The overwhelming industry response to that question has been, “‘more,’ bigger, louder and more controversial.”
“More” looks like a consistent, omnichannel presence. “More” looks like more data, more details, more intrusive ways to get that data, new tools to help us parse out all that new data. “More” looks like longer and longer ICAs, hotter takes, tighter segments, everywhere all at once at an increasingly unrelenting pace.
That’s why we now have more noise to contend with than ever before in the history of humankind. Because folks have taken competition in the attention economy to the next level.
Here’s the thing: we’re human beings.
Human beings are limited.
There is a literal, biological limit on what we can pay attention to.
So the more there is the more there is to ignore.
Adding more and more and more is just…teaching human brains to filter you out.
Think of it this way: We all have a limited amount of attentional coins.
We don’t often get more.
But we do often get less.
Whether by the slow decay of time or as a result of our environments, our attentional resources will fluctuate downwards.
First, consider the effect of economic and societal instability on the allocation of those coins. Those environmental factors mean that more of our attentional coins are (and have been for years) given over to the goal of keeping us and our loved once safe. Leaving precious little for everything else.
And when we look at everything else we are meant to filter, sort and allocate our smaller pile of attentional coins to, we get…a literally unprecedented deluge of information.
As it is, our brain’s filters are already in overdrive because of our economic and societal realities—remember that little pandemic?
Our already limited resources haven’t suddenly grown to accommodate this.
Translation: the work we do on behalf of our clients is becoming easier and easier to ignore.
And “more, bigger, louder and more controversial” just makes the situation worse and worse and worse.
After all, “easier to ignore” really just means less likely to get past the brain’s filters.
Here’s the math: the core reason our related industries care about ICAs is because they make demographic and psychographic segmentation easier. It makes it more likely that the folks penned into these segments share similar life experiences.
And that makes it easier to talk to all of them while seeming to talk to each of them.
Easier.
But with all the noise our poor limited attentional resources need to filter through, a milquetoast approach unrelated to anything but our ages, gender and hobbies/affinities is less likely to actually be noticeable. Mechanically, that means it’s less likely to get past the brain’s filters which means it’s less likely to be memorable. And all of that means it’s easier to ignore.
ICAs literally set us up for failure.