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Either they fail to differentiate their markets and create nonspecific marketing for everyone, or they create approaches to segments based on their own product-centric view of the world.

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buyer persona research ensures that you market using the voice of your buyer, not of your founder, CEO, product manager, or public relations (PR) agency staffer. This builds a bond of trust with your buyers that leads them into the buying process, making your salespeople's work easier and quicker.

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Organizations that take the time to understand their buyer personas escape the trap of selling to the wrong people at the wrong time. You will see that by being helpful and informative rather than hyping, your marketing will come alive.

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The marketer's need to understand the market is hardly new. But the depth of insight required is increasing exponentially as technological advances demand that organizations rethink how they sell everything

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when buyer personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers—in the form of one-on-one interviews—the methodology and presentation allows you to capture the buyer's expectations and the factors that influence them.

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Naturally, it's far easier to make educated guesses and assumptions about what buyers may be thinking based on extrapolations of your own knowledge or intuition. That's certainly how large aspects of the marketing community have functioned for decades. But the climate of social and technological change favors companies that embrace a culture of buyer understanding that allows them to adapt to customer needs.

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whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. It is specifically aimed at marketers of “mediumand high-consideration” products, services, and solutions—buying decisions that require a considerable investment of your buyers' thought and time.

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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.

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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.

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Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data. Defining markets based on demographics—data such as a person's age, income, marital status, and education—is the legacy of 60 years of selling to the mass market.

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When large-circulation magazines and network television were marketing to the public en masse, demographics helped them create market segments that could be targeted by their advertisers and program managers. Many companies, especially those that market retail consumer products, still rely on demographics to define their markets. Yet such distinctions can be irrelevant, if not misleading, when applied in many instances of persuasive marketing.

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Some marketers will focus on psychographics, another long-standing approach to segmenting markets based on factors such as personality, values, lifestyles, and opinions. This approach might capture the fact that Jim goes to church regularly, is skilled at managing people, and is challenged by keeping multiple balls in the air. But this information has little bearing on how he will evaluate and choose a logistics management supplier.

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The Buyer Profile has gained a lot of traction because it is a useful tool to help you think about your target buyers as real people, with actual families, typical bosses, and human concerns. For the same reason that we find it far easier to communicate via social media when we have a photograph of a person we have never met in person, the Buyer Profile creates a sense of the human connection with people whom we have never met face-to-face.

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The agency marketers could have benefited from building buyer personas that included two parts: a Buyer Profile that describes Jessica, and Buying Insights, describing the when, how, and why aspects of Jessica's decision to buy a car.

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Unlike the simple categories that typify a Buyer Profile, your buyer's story is a lengthy narrative related through the personal buying experiences of people like those you want to influence.

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Buying Insights reveal: Which buyers are receptive, and which will ignore you no matter what you say Which aspects of your solution are relevant to them, and which are irrelevant What attitudes prevent your buyers from considering your solutions What resources your buyers trust as they evaluate their options Which buyers are involved in the decision and how much influence they wield

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A Buyer Profile alone allows you to focus on who your buyer is through demographic data assigned to a fictional name and portrait. When you combine the Buyer Profile with Buying Insights, you will have clear guidance for the decisions you need to make to win their business.

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low-consideration buying decisions are best understood through complex algorithms that examine the buyer's online behavior, or through costly choice modeling and ethnographic studies that attempt to examine mind-sets that people cannot explain, even to themselves. Marketers of high-consideration solutions are fortunate that a technique as simple as the one in this book reveals even greater insight.

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A person's thoughts about an impulsive or low-consideration buying decision usually reside in the realm of the unconscious. Conversely, high-consideration buying decisions involve, by definition, considerable conscious thought that can be expressed, evaluated, and analyzed.

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as individuals invest more time and effort thinking about a challenge or solution, they simultaneously become more acutely aware of the journey they have undertaken and the steps they followed to reach their conclusion. Active contemplation and reflection that took place over an extended period of time is far, far easier to recount than trying to recapture the dynamics behind decisions made quickly and then seldom revisited.

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It's worth remembering that many good products have been developed at a time before the market is ready for them. The first tablet computer and first e-book readers went on sale years before the market was prepared to embrace them and before the technology was able to deliver the experience that buyers wanted. Alas, the companies who were first to market are no longer in business.

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the importance of insights and how they are distinct from ordinary knowledge.

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carefully consider how we use insights to influence the people around us. We wonder how many times the benefits of a remarkable discovery were delayed or entirely lost due to a failure to communicate it effectively.

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When Alan Cooper sat down to design a new project management software program, he was wrestling with a troubling problem. He instinctively knew that software should be designed to meet users' needs, but at that time, programmers were very technically oriented people who were building products that users found intimidating.

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Searching for guidance on a user-friendly design, he decided to interview an assortment of colleagues who seemed to be the software's likely end users.

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What he learned from these user interviews resulted in the creation of an imaginary user—Kathy—a composite named after one of the people he interviewed. By thinking about Kathy, Cooper could speculatively project the concerns and expectations of his new software's users, and mentally imagine their reactions to the various ways that he might design the solution he was developing.

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In a recollection published a quarter of a century later, Cooper wrote: As I walked, I would engage myself in a dialogue, play-acting a project manager, loosely based on Kathy, requesting functions and behavior from my program. I often found myself deep in those dialogues, speaking aloud, and gesturing with my arms. Some of the golfers were taken aback by my unexpected presence and unusual behavior, but that didn't bother me because I found that this play-acting technique was remarkably effective for cutting through complex design questions of functionality and interaction, allowing me to clearly see what was necessary and unnecessary and, more importantly, to differentiate between what was used frequently and what was needed only infrequently.

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The program that Cooper designed was both a critical and commercial triumph. Bolstered by this success, he employed it again while writing the software that would be the core of Visual Basic, the foundation for the graphical user interface behind Microsoft Windows 3.0.

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By interviewing people similar to those who would use his new products, Cooper had access to insights that dramatically altered the quality of the product designs that he controlled. But his ability to persuade teams to take advice from their users was accomplished by aggregating those insights into a persona.

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making the distinction that buyers have different needs, expectations, and goals than users.

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His mention of buyer personas was a caution to software designers to separate customers into two categories—the “before purchase” buyer persona and the “after purchase” user persona.

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Unfortunately, as buyer personas have evolved to include some of the excellent principles that Cooper originated to help designers, this evolution has also transferred ideas that are counterproductive for marketers. These practices have resulted in bloated personas that miss the key insights marketers need.

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one popular but misguided idea that has transferred from user to buyer personas is that they should describe a “day in the life” of the buyer. You can see why an engineer who is designing a solution that is used daily could benefit from insights about the user's day. These insights would certainly affect the product design and could even reveal the need for an entirely new innovation for that user. But if you are marketing a high-consideration solution such as a vacation destination, you can just as easily see that your buyer persona's typical day is of little value. The same is true for the senior executive whom you hope to persuade to invest in your costly capital equipment. By definition, a high-consideration decision occurs infrequently and spans many days, weeks, months, or even years. A typical day would certainly not include any activity relevant to a decision like the one you want to influence.