Personas are a seemingly foundational and simple tool, yet deceptively challenging. At Forrester, we’ve fielded numerous client requests to better understand how to create, evolve, and operationalize personas. And we’ve seen a range of success with personas: from companies who have created best-in-class, well-adopted personas to personas that are left on a shelf or lead to misguided decision-making.

By and large, personas have not changed much over the years. What has changed, however, are the ways that companies have misused them: creating personas that invite bias, overloading with irrelevant data, or using personas as the default audience framework when other tools (e.g., segmentations) are a better fit.

The Qualities Of An Effective Persona

In our new report, Best Practices For Creating Effective Personas, we highlight the reasons why B2C marketers, customer experience professionals, and digital business and strategy leaders use personas, when to use or update their personas, a best-practice process to create personas, and the seven effective qualities of personas, which include being:

  • Purpose-built. Many personas are built without a clear objective or reason, or simply because “we need personas.” Building personas because every company seemingly has one is not reason enough — in fact, designing on that reason alone oftentimes leads to personas that are too broad, don’t guide decision-making, and are left to gather dust. It’s important to ask yourself, “What are the three initiatives these personas will inform? Who will use them, and how will they use them?”
  • Insights-based. Personas are only as effective as the research that goes into them, but the research must be objective and not based on assumptions. Don’t get us wrong, there is space for assumptions — as a way to create a hypothesis to guide the research. But ensuring that quantitative or qualitative research is conducted is crucial, as it will help mitigate bias, inject fresh insights into the personas, and invalidate internal assumptions.
  • Goals-oriented. A core benefit of personas is to help stakeholders empathize with the company’s audiences. Unlike segments, which are based on quantifiable data such as demographics or psychographics, a persona is based on patterns of the user’s, audience’s, or customer’s goals, motivations, and behaviors, ultimately helping to enable empathy.

Get In Touch With Forrester

Are you getting started on your persona journey, updating your personas, or simply want to understand if personas are the right tool for you? If you’re a Forrester client, check out this new report, as well as accompanying tools such as Evaluate Your Personas With This Checklist, or you can schedule a guidance session with us. You can also follow or connect with Audrey and Gina on LinkedIn.