Persona Behaviour Predicts Future

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

Mis-behaving Personae and confused marketers.

As a warning to readers–the following post is not gentle and is meant to simulate creative thought…I hope!

Personae are cool, very cool and I promise you a unique way to understand and exploit their power.  What is a persona?  A persona is a mask which illuminates the potential behaviour of its wearer. 

Why would marketers confuse a persona with a market segement? Desperation or worse?  While I do know very professional and dedicated marketers, my sense is that most of them should either seriously or at least causally consider more fulfilling work.

As a storyteller, and fully recovered accountant, I am at a loss to explain why any sensible commercial entity would strip the stories that describe their customer interactions, replace them with a cash register transactional record and then one year later pay a marketer to poll an ‘average’ customer to determine why customers purchased their product in the past.  To add insult to injuries the same marketer is usually asked to use the same ‘data’ to determine the future behaviour of said ‘customer’.

I call these type of operators ‘numerati‘ or confused marketers who believe that numbers alone reveal truth.

Market segmentation techniques are useful, polling is useful, conversations with customers help significantly and at the end of the day all are helpful.  What is less helpfull is taking stories that occurred in the past and casting them forward in a changed world where the only way to truly understand future behaviour is to ask someone shortly before or immediately after it is observed.

The most interesting expression of persona behaviours is taking place right now with the US Presidential election with Barack Obama and John McCain.  Consider the manner in which stories, behaviours and action are being synchronized by the Obama campaign and the lack of same by the McCain camp.  While this type of accord may be happening spontaneously, it is interesting to watch, especially when you consider that the persona behaviours of the candidates and their followers span media, locations and time.

In my opinion a serious marketer or persona practitioner would do well by observing the last 3 months of the US presidential campaign.

Persona Behaviour Tools–> www.scenario2.com