Yahoo has used personae for close to ten years now to help them serve their customers better and maximize revenues to achieve success in the brutally competitive search market.

However, Yahoo uses personae strictly to group user interaction behaviours of their customers as indicated here:

Yahoo recently sent a Yodel Ancedotal message to customers focused on (Neuro)Persona behaviour surveys:

we look at the story of Jewellery repair and FedEx.

Now why is this important to Yahoo?  Simple, if Yahoo can accomodate behaviours the actual people exhibiting the behaviours are irrelevent in that it doesn’t matter if they are young, old, rich, poor, strong or weak.

Elementally (Neuro)Personae render marketing segmentation analysis redundant.  I would have said useless, but in my view it has been that way for decision making for a considerable period of time.

Cheers,

Nick www.adscenario.com www.neuropersona.com www.speedsynch.com

Media is a container of stories and may be understood by using a Neuropersona concept where masks are worn by Personati or people to take a particular perspective represented by stories and processes attached to each mask.

How do we know which Media helps us get our messages to the right people?

Think about Media just like you would a story.  Some stories resonate with some people, others do not, and to help us understand how to align our stories we must consider the Neuropersona masks that are helpful to people.  When we take this perspective we quickly see that not all Media yields the same results and if our objectives change we are alerted to the different Media options and changes that suit our new requirements.  Life constantly changes and our use of Media should align with the changes important to our values.

Alignment is a critical component to Media and the Personati behind the Neuropersona masks.

Cheers,

Nick www.neuropersona.com

Persona Tools and NeuroPersona Perpective

A modest amount of training of Persona concepts or slightly more complex NeuroPersona tools can help people see future opportunities and mitigate risks.  This is done with a Story Lens which can be adjusted by the Person behind the Persona Mask as needed.

How is a Story Lens  used? 

From a personal point of view it helps you navigate.  This might mean content, products, places, stories…

From a commercial seller’s point of view a Persona supports ALIGNMENT.

Cheers,

Nick www.scenario2.com

Magnetism can help us understand the potential of Persona Marketing using the simple rules that opposite charges attract and identical charges repel. 

A seller may place a positive charge on a product to attract buyers after paying marketers to research and segment markets and build the brand.  Marketing strategy and efforts would focus on the findings, observations and analysis that buyers are attracted to products with a positive charge.

It is at this point that more often than not that a strange thing happens.  Some buyers (negative charge) purchase the offered product (positive charge) but many others with the same interests don’t buy.  Other buyers (positive charge) who would never be expected to buy actually buy the product (positive charge).

Welcome to reality where a Persona changes behaviour instantly, for their own reasons, in their own time.  

An AC motor operates by alternating charges from positive to negative constantly but unlike the AC motor we never know why or when a person may wear or discard a Persona mask and its associated behaviours.

How do we adjust to serve our customers, stay relevant and earn profit?

We must simply serve Persona behaviours and let people behind the mask tell us what to do.  This is done by providing sensible Persona based navigation options or choices.  In the previous story a person may wear one Persona (positive charge) or another (negative charge).  We would never be able to tell which Persona mask is being worn by an individual unless they declare.  Providing a person the ability to declare their interest is simpler than most people think and a web site is one way to accomplish this by providing different paths to people with different interests or Persona behaviours.   A Persona declares their interest and the value useful to them by navigating the web site.

For more details around web site navigation see www.scenario2.com and to to Web Strategy Instruction.

Cheers,

Nick www.scenario2.com

A Persona mask represents behaviours and may be worn or removed by someone as needed.  We use the idea of a Persona to illuminate stories, processes and probabilities to serve people behind the Persona.  I have trained marketers, accountants and executives in the art of Persona Marketing and to employ Persona Behaviour analysis techniques quickly and effectively.  Two of the most powerful tools that help us understand Persona Behaviour are the Story Lens and Storyboard Maps. 

Stories are at the core of a Persona mask and the Story Lens  is the set represented by stories, processes, software, brands and KPIs or measures–stories on the left and numbers on the right, 

Storyboards allow us to map, understand and communicate stories across the Story Lens quickly and simply.  Numbers and coordinates are at the core of any map which is much more than a series of lines or a maze to be traversed. 

The art of prediction, highly valued by marketers, accountants and bookmakers, starts with understanding what has happened to  determine which activities may repeat (processes), whether the same tools (cars, software…) might be used again and the core drivers of previous activities.  A critical component in successfully preparing for the future is the use of measures such as time, dollars, distance and others to add context to past behaviours and to probabilistically determine when and under which circumstances they might reoccur.  Scenarios lift the art of preparing for future success to new heights and should be studied carefully once Personae and their relationship to stories and numbers become familiar.

A Persona mask combined with a Story Lens–stories, processes, software, brands and KPI’s or numbers, link vastly different perspectives required by marketers, accountants and executives.  This is done by associating stories and numbers common to the different perspectives to infer probabalistic behaviours.

What is probabilistic behaviour?

Since a Persona is a mask worn by a person, understanding future Persona Behaviour allows us align our future products and services to the people behind the mask.  Since we can never know exactly how behaviours will occur in the future we use Scenarios to determine a range of behaviours and to get a sense of the probability that some behaviours might occur in the future.  If this seems a little strange consider the profession of Finance and how accountants forecast.  A financial forecast is made to plan where a business is going and determine measures of success. 

What is behind all those numbers carefully constructed by accountants in plans of one, two or more years? Stories, pure and simple.  Accountants convert stories to numbers and place them in a structure called a chart of accounts.   Then accountants manipulate numbers for the rest of the year in a way that separates them from the stories that were at their core.  Indeed accountants ‘map’ out the future of the business with numbers rather than stories.

Our practice is to blend stories, numbers, maps and storyboards to avoid the common trap that marketers and accounts fall into as they manipulate numbers and stories independently of each other.  This ’split’ causes stories and numbers that started at the same place to get out of sync with each other.

Stories and numbers continue to be aligned to Personae or the business gets out of harmony with customers and suppliers.  The lack of harmony is a dis-ease which typically results in something breaking.

More about the link between numbers and stories may be found at http://personati.wordpress.com

Cheers,

Nick www.scenario2.com

Does a persona have DNA?

A Persona is a mask that may be worn or removed at will though the wearer may be impacted by the stories and measures associated to the Persona.  Simply put a Persona may act the same way on a person as DNA.

Like DNA a Persona’s stories may be mapped and measured, and Persona DNA is unique and permits many Personae to have similar features or characteristics.  Unlike human DNA, a person can discard one Persona and pick up another many times in a day.

Many cultures have the concept of shapeshifters or tricksters that change their appearances at will and indeed this happens everyday in our own culture if you subscribe to the Persona concept.

In my experience Persona DNA proves to be a simple and effective analysis tool though this is ambiguous if you don’t differentiate between a Persona, person or market segment label.

Future posts will explore how different cultures view masks and the stories they represent.

Cheers,

Nick www.scenario2.com

How do winners measure Marketing Performance?

Look at all those companies and organzations that are successful and you will see a common theme, service.  Profit may not event be in the top three KPIs or key performance indicators and that is because profit is a symptom or result of success not the cause.

Service.  It sounds simple though it requires consideration, focus and dedication, all of the things in short supply when times are tough.  Oddly enough one of the toughest things required to be of service is to measure differently and shift perspectives from being a seller or provider to a buyer.

How does one accomplish a perspective shift?  It may be easier to identify ways that it is not accomplished. 

Do not offer services that have been successful yesterday.  In tough times or good times people adjust and change the way they operate.  This can be described as a change in process.  All of the products or services that they bought yesterday served yesterdays processes and don’t fit today.

Do not copy your most successful competitor as they for similar reasons will be selling products and services that will not be in demand tomorrow and even more importantly it is extremely difficult to change what everyone sees as successful behaviour.

Do not listen to your most value customer as they typically demand help for problems that are causing them the most pain.  Pain points can switch very quickly and hurt you too especially if you have built an inventory or trained staff to accomodate a problem that is about to disappear or be replaced.

But then what do we do and how do we shift our perspective to that of a buyer and attract success?

Understanding what people are about to do so that you can accomodate future success is the path less travelled and can be achieved with simple tools and consistant focused effort. 

Here are two simple steps that will start you on the path. 

1. Pick the most successful products or services in your market, yours and your competitors and then identify the buyer processes that they serve today.  Use this ‘magic pair’–product/service and buyer processes–and overlay them on top of your market segment lables.  Pay close attention to those market segments that have the same processes. 
2. Create a Personae based on groups of buyer behaviours that may span market segments and then match the Personae to the products and services identified in step 1.  

Now it gets simpler, we watch.  We are watching for small changes in processes important to people while simultaneously watching to see if products or services are changing to accomodate processes that are new to our understanding of what buyers need today.  In my experience this exercise provides a clear and simple indicator of what our clients, current and future, want tomorrow.

The simple truth of Marketing Performance or any performance indicator is that it measures what just happened, what was important yesterday.  Shifting your perspective to Persona Behaviour will permit you to serve with future need in mind.

Once this is done please remember to shift your perspective of performance as your old measures, like fish on a counter in the hot sun, will start to smell badly, very quickly.

Cheers,

Nick  nick@scenario2.com 

TIPS, TOOLS, RESOURCES 

Marketstory, Numerati, Persona, Wireframes & Scenarios Persona Driven Analysis & Portals Persona Based Business Intelligence 3D Persona

Research indicates that Persona behaviour can span multiple interaction channels and shows that an individual can pick up and remove Persona masks at will according to their objectives and their measures of success.

Understanding how someone picks up and discards a Persona can help us serve our customers sublimely.

A laser like focus on service allows Persona practitioners to step up and offer unique value to our clients and their customers.

Forecasts and the future may be important to accountants and marketers but are best determined by the storyteller who bridges the present and the future by using a tool called a Persona or the representation of how someone might act in the future according to objectives important to them at that time.

How can a storyteller understand the future?  By using stories, pure and simple.

People depend on stories to understand their environment and processes important to them.  In our current techno-oriented world processes are or rather need to be accelerated by software.  Likewise stories create brand value which is then measured by numbers.  I call this sentence my ‘Story Lens’–tell a story twice and it becomes a process, tell it again and someone writes software, tell it again and it becomes a brand value and tell it yet again and someone creates a measure or KPI.

The Story Lens is a tool that provides perspective to a person.  Now it gets interesting.

Consider that perspective can be change at will and that perspective depends on what is being measured.  Typically measures involve two elements, a data set and a formula–this is also called a KPI.

A KPI is pointed to a process which is also a behaviour exhibited by a Persona.

NOW…to understand the future we set TARGETS, usually numbers, that we use to compare our performance and help us adjust to our customer, competitive or market circumstances.

WHAT is the commonality between today and tomorrow?  Stories, Numbers and Personae or people.

Understanding Persona behaviour allows us to understand what will happen in the future.  The relationships between Numbers, Stories and the future is explored at www.scenario2.com or www.marketstory.com