Everyone knows (or should) what a persona is: fictional characters or ambassadors that represent a context and behavior and embody your target customers’ key behaviors, attributes, motivations, and goals during their shopping journey. Driven by data, personas come to life with names, photographs, and vivid narratives that describe day-in-the-life scenario. But we’re going to focus today on some ways to think about your persona that you maybe haven’t thought about.
Personas Are Not Just for Marketing
Most businesses use personas for their marketing and advertising team, helping create empathy and insight into our buyer for creative designers and media planners. But they can also be used by Sales and Operations. Well-written personas get everyone in the company on the same page about your business goals and who your customer is. Using your buyer personas across the organization ensures that every product developed, service offered, blog post, sales email, and customer service response, etc. is consistent in message and aligned with your customer’s needs and expectations.
Call Center Hint: Use customer service calls to help shape your persona – what are the problems they express? What are they asking? Then use the persona(s) to train new agents, prioritize customer needs (is our customer tech-savvy? time-crunched? budget conscious? how might that change how we script responses?) and then create a feedback loop where your persona can update with new call center or customer service inputs.
Personas Should Evolve (or Expire)
When you create personas, how long do you use them? How long SHOULD you? Be sure and timestamp personas when you create them and create a re-evaluation date. As you’re thinking of how often you should update, think through the trigger points that SHOULD change your strategy. This includes things like: how often do new competitors enter the market? Have you made any feature updates to your products or services that could slightly change who would be interested in becoming a customer? Is your audience aging? What about your competitors? What product or feature changes have they made and how often do they do that? Even general cultural shifts all can render your persona virtually useless (If you crated a persona during COVID, that’s likely well-outdated by now).
In 2025, “Made in America” is more relevant than ever with Tariffs in the national spotlight. Same goes for products that allow for DEI. Does your positioning need to change as your customer mindset is changing to prioritize different needs and wants?
Personas Aren’t Just People – They’re Situations
While your persona has a photo and a name, oftentimes personas are more a situation than a set-in-stone stereotype. The same person can shift between different personas depending on their mood, mindset, task, or sense of urgency. Think of personas as snapshots of behavior in a particular journey stage—not a rigid identity. For example; A buyer might be methodical and detail-focused while doing early research—matching a “Curious Researcher” persona. But that same person could shift into a “Decisive Buyer” persona once they’ve narrowed their options and are ready to act quickly. Understanding this fluidity helps teams avoid one-size-fits-all messaging and instead respond to where the customer is in their journey.
You Can (and Should) Test Personas
So you’ve used a bunch of data sources to create your persona. And you know that it can and should evolve, but we’re not done there. You can and should validate your persona(s). Validate behaviors – using web analytics, social media behaviors, call center calls, sales team and CRM data, surveys and feedback forms, and A/B testing. Validate needs and perceptions with surveys, focus groups, call center logs, and CSAT scores, social listening, and search data. In fact, during your evaluation phase you should be looking at assumed pain points and frustrations, information sources and buying triggers, demographics, preferred channels and so on.
Hot Take! You Don’t Need a Name, Photo, or Favorite Coffee
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking your persona has to have quirky backstories with clever first and last names, how many pets they have – and even headshots. What makes a creative and memorable leave-behind often detracts from what matters: What this person is trying to do, why, and how do they go about making decisions? Leave out traits that can give a false sense of purpose (great that they have 2 dogs, but if its not an important factor in the way they shop for laptops, leave it off!). Avoid encouraging stereotypes and assumptions and don’t waste time on storytelling or pulling thru one specific quote if its not actually an insight that’s relevant. “Molly drinks Oat Milk Lattes” doesn’t have anything to do with her lawn and garden purchases, but if the insight is that she looks for ecologically-minded options that COULD impact her buying, then include that detail specifically. If that’s not true and she just likes the way it tastes, you might make a biased assumption about Molly based on the oat milk.
What SHOULD you include? How do they make decisions? what are their goals and needs? What are their pain points and barriers? What motivates them? Include demographics that are relevant for targeting or for design (saying F age 18-65 isn’t helpful really to anyone – just leave it off!). Describe behaviors. Include what type of content they like for entertainment, education, news, (etc.) and where do they consume it (and when!). Quotes or anecdotes specifically related to how they shop, make decisions, or about common obstacles are okay. Your persona should have a name, but it should be descriptive. Think Function over Fiction. Like “role + motivation” is great for aligning with lifecycle stages or purchase drivers – i.e., “Small Business Owner with No Time“. “Behavior + situation” is great for journey mapping or channel prioritization like “Sunday Meal Prepper“. Last, “job function + trigger” works great for B2B or businesses targeting someone in reference to their employment, like “CMO Merging Brands“
Your Persona is Probably Too Vague
Most personas start with good intentions—and then stall out with labels like “busy professional,” “tech-savvy millennial,” or “working parent.” These might sound familiar, but they’re too vague to drive real decisions. They describe demographics, not behavior. Instead focus on specificity and relevance. Calling a persona a Busy Professional and telling us she’s short on time is not as relevant as calling her “mid-level manager who tries to fit in work during toddler naps” and it paints a different picture of her barriers and opportunities.
Vague personas lead to vague strategies. Make sure you include behavior specificity – and break it down into behavioral context. It gives the teams something to design for, market to, or optimize around. Don’t settle for clichés. Get closer to the moment of decision—and design your strategy from there.
Make Personas Work Harder by Thinking Smarter
Personas aren’t just profiles on a page — they’re windows into real moments and decisions. I hope you’re inspired to review your current personas, or your processes for creating and evaluating them. If you have, whats missing? Contact Alchemical Insights Consulting if you’d like help with your personas – we can audit, help build new, and much, much more.