Buyer Personas

Ishaan Kumar
501904154
Know Who Is Your Buyer Before Designing Your Product

• Not understanding the consumer's wants and desires is the right formula for disaster. When
entering a new market, it is important to perform surveys to understand the purchaser.
• If you don't do your homework, your goods will collect dust instead of making a profit.
Surprisingly, that's exactly what happened to Apple when the third-generation iPhone was
launched in Japan. The Japanese bought 5 million smartphones last year.
• The following year when Apple launched the iPhone, unlike the other markets where Apple acted
and was a success, it managed to penetrate just 4 per cent of the Japanese market (10x lower than
the American market and sold almost exclusively to consumers already accustomed to Apple
products.
• The explanation is very plain, the Japanese were used to shooting videos and watching TV shows
on their mobile phones, and the iPhone of that generation didn't even have a video-recording
camera. So to understand your customer's needs, you should get to know them. Unlike Apple,
Beko, a Turkish home appliance company, had interviews with potential customers before
launching a clothes dryer in China.
• Beko's marketing team discovered from the interview results that most Chinese believe that there
is a spiritual component when clothes are exposed to the sun." So Beko created a dryer for the
Chinese market, making it possible to pause the cycle in the middle of the process, allowing
consumers to dry their clothes in the sun. That attitude was rewarded, and Beko's dryers became a
success.
Know Your Tool: Buyer Personas
• You need to build Consumer Personas to help you figure out why consumers make
buying decisions and their expectations. Detailed, semi-fictional explanations of the
various types of potential customers are presented.
• Buyer personas catalogs the issues and needs of clients, recognizes the patterns of
thinking and identifies the types of solutions that might be of interest to these groups.
• Knowing each customer's profile will tell you things like their drinking habits, factors
that you would never know otherwise The following case study exemplifies: Regis
Mckenna (a marketer) was asked to build Personas by a company that sold pocket
calculators. He then noticed how customers chose their customer's calculators from a
variety of business choices.

• He found that when customers compared models of different weights, they preferred
the heavier ones. Why? Why?
• They associated weight with product quality. Mckenna took his discovery to his client
and told them to go against common sense that smaller calculators were better.On the
contrary, they should make calculators heavier than those of rivals. The client released
new and heavier calculators, and his sales take off. Curious, isn’t it?
Adopting Personas In Your Business
• At the outset, it is common to encounter opposition from directors, managers and
other staff when introducing new ideas in the marketing department, and it is most
likely that this will happen when you suggest that your marketing message and
goods be matched with your people.

• Some managers and team members may feel that the project is a waste of time and
that the money spent in defining the profiles will never be returned to cash
registers. Another common excuse is to hear from traditionalists that they already
know their customers. To persuade them, set up a meeting with members of the
team who do not believe in the new tool.

• At this conference, ask them to pretend to be buyers of your goods while asking
them a few questions. Some good examples of questions would be How did you
figure out that you wanted the kind of solution that we were offering? "How do you
test the solutions of our competitors? "And why did you choose our solution rather
than the competition? ”
• Remember that the majority of team members think from the point of view of
the organization rather than the customer. You can hear responses that say,
"Our company's products are better" or they have the best cost-benefit."
• When this occurs, it is sufficient to point out that the team faces the customer
as if it understands the corporate workings and takes the company's viewpoint,
when in reality the client has little knowledge of the company's business goals
and the personal incentive to select goods and services.
• Obviously, if it were accurate that all customers understood that our product
provides the best cost-benefit ratio, we would be market leaders, wouldn't we?
But how are we going to lose to the competition?

• These are useful statements to show to the participants that it is important to

• When the team has been interacting with people, the next move is clear. You're going to
need to build the Character. Work starts with arranging interviews with prospective
customers and clients.
• How are you going to make contact with them? First of all, you need to find your buyers,
and for that you will need support from the sales team. While interviews and research are
done by the marketing department, salespeople are the ones who best know their
potential customers.
• They have a database of all those who have purchased goods or at least requested
information about your business (even if they chose the competitor). You can find many
people in this database who are suitable candidates for interviews. But in addition to the
support from the sales department's database, you will find interviewees outside the
database from outside sources. Don't really assume that the sales team database is going
to be ideal for you.
For example, it may contain incorrect email addresses, old phone numbers, and so
on.Also, external sources such as qualitative research agencies can help you reach not
only the right people for the search but also people who have never had contact with your
brand.Having feedback from these potential consumers can help increase your reach.
Good Answers Come From Good Questions

• In an interview with the buyer, the only question you need to think about
and plan in advance is the first question. At the end of the day the first
question would be about the first time the interviewee knew that there was
an issue to solve.
• You might say for example, "Tell me about the morning that you found out
you needed a new email marketing solution? What happened to you? "The
answer is probably not going to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an
end. He/she might give you a direct, closed answer that doesn't help you that
much. The ideal, therefore, is to use open-ended questions to better
understand the situation.
• To make these questions a little more elaborate, you need to listen carefully
to the way he/she answers the questions. Consider the response to our
hypothetical query. He/she could respond that the impetus to find a new
approach for email marketing was the need to execute more successful
campaigns and calculate the return on investment in strategic marketing.
• Here the interviewee talked about the benefit of the
solution, but did not answer the question. You want to
know what prompted the quest for solutions, so you
can figure out what the customer needs.
• To find these reasons, use the words of the interviewee
when asking the next questions. For example, you
might say, "Let's go back for a while. You told me you
need to calculate the return on your marketing
expenditure and its effectiveness."
• What has made these issues a priority for your
business? This line of questioning will lead you to
more straightforward and substantial responses as to
why the customer started searching for solutions at
the outset.
Analyze The Insights To Classify
• To understand buyer behavior, you need to talk to them to reveal the Five Circles
of Understanding the Purchase. By doing this, you will learn everything you need
to know about your buyers’ decisions. The first is Priority Initiative. You want to
find out why some buyers decide to look for solutions and why others remain
satisfied with the status quo. You can find priorities initiatives through the
questions highlighted in the previous points. The second is Success Factors.

• These are the results that your buyer profile expects to obtain from the purchase
of your product. Is she looking for greater efficiency? Cost reduction? Or
something else?

• The next one is Identified Barriers. Here, you want to identify any reasons for a
buyer perceiving your solution as inadequate as well as other existing hesitations.
For example, your potential buyer may be concerned about the
purchase privacy or perceive the company as unreliable.
• Then there is the Buyer’s Journey. You want to learn about who and what
influences your buyer and how he evaluates the options in the selection process.
For example, if you are a company that sells to other companies, you may realize
that the marketing director of the client company interferes with all buying
decisions.

• This information can help you prioritize your marketing investments to ensure
that you can work with the marketing director as well and engage him in the
buying process as soon as possible. Lastly, the Decision Criteria is what
designates the critical aspects of the optimal solutions for the potential customer
as well as his/her expectations.

• You want to know things like whether he/she seeks a simple and user-friendly
solution or if you need a more comprehensive package. Once you have identified
the answers to these questions, you have finally completed the buyer’s persona.
Create Buyer Persona Profiles
• What's next after bringing the data together? Now the careful
study begins. Remember: you're not really searching for facts to
validate what you really believe. Rather, you can try to be as
realistic as possible to genuinely discover what the consumer
wants.
• Where to get started? Collect all the interview details for each
circle in a single narrative. If you've interviewed 20 customers,
you don't want 20 different findings. Instead, you want to apply
the knowledge to a single discovery.
• Obviously, this does not mean collecting all the details without a
meaning. You should also group the data for each of the five
Purchase Understanding Circles. Separate the data on a sheet of
paper for each circle.
• For each page, find a memorable word, recognize who said it
and add a descriptive title that draws your attention to what
has been said. For example, when writing about the Decision
Criteria Circle, you might have identified the following phrase
from a potential buyer: "I don't want to spend my money on
developing a solution specifically for us.

• And write a title in the other column that easily defines what
he said. When you've finished this exercise with each of the
five circles, you've organized the answers to all the interview
questions. With these answers, you're going to discover the
meaning of your buyer's tale in a straightforward way.
Customize Your Company Around The
Persona
• With the results of the interview, you are prepared to answer this issue:
the unique and primary needs of your customers. In interviews with your
target audience, you will recognize your issues, challenges, passions and
motives as you relate to the multitude of goods available on the market.

• For the individual created, you're going to have a full history of your
customer, which involves the entire process of understanding your
consumption and purchasing patterns. Now that you know what (s)he
wants and knows their preferences, the challenge is to communicate with
what they want to hear what you have to tell.

• A good start is to document all of your solution's features and value ideas
in the "Benchmark of your product." Check out the list of buyer's needs,
issues, and motivations for a list called "Buyer Expectations."
• Place both lists side by side and search for points of intercession, that is,
where your claims match consumer standards. Another useful tip is: if
you have experienced a recurrent customer problem that your product
does not fix, there might be a great opportunity for innovation.
• For example, if durability is a defining feature of your product and the
consumer is looking for long durability, then you can relate these points.
• Write a sentence for each of these variations – things like, "We are
flexible and able to adapt our solution to your unique needs." That way,
your creative/marketing and sales departments can know what kind of
message you want to communicate. Now you can actually get your
Customer Personas and apply them to your business, make sure that
your product is sold to the right audience, has the advantages and
features of your company.