Speaker 1: This next research idea can be optional and it's heavily used when doing user experience and user interface design, or UX UI design, but there's something we can do to help us establish our target audience and that is to create a user persona, or in this case a customer persona. We want to take the information the client gave us to put together a profile that lists basic stats about this potential customer, as well as possible goals, likes, and dislikes. Being able to put a name to a face helps when we get to the concept and brainstorming phase. When we create a brand design, we always picture ourselves looking at the logo, but the client's product and service may not be for us. I think it is important to recognize that we may not be our client's target audience. I think a lot of designers assume this role, but we need to step back and realize who we are designing this for. I want you to be as detailed as you like with these customer personas. They need to feature possible age and job titles. A big question I get from people is, do you just make all this up? Well, you're going to need some data and hopefully your client has provided you with some or you can ask for it. If not, you can always research trends and certain age demographics as well. You could do surveys, you can make calls to those you know who might be close to this target customer. Multiple user personas? Yes, you can have multiple different customer types. Therefore, it's natural to have multiple user personas that help you better represent your varied target audience. The goals for these user personas are in some cases, you can call them a customer persona or a client persona, depending on your client's industry. It's to help us see a person behind our design decisions later on. Our brand design is meant for someone or a group of people and it's great to be able to visualize them and it goes a long way. I am here in the brand guide and I'm going to go ahead and get into this page that talks about defining your target audience. We talked a little bit about the user personas and how it's great to develop a couple of them before we get started into the brainstorming process. But I wanted to talk about just showing you kind of an example of a user persona in action. I almost always like to put a photo on these because I think it's important to be able to put that visual to a name so that when we start to brainstorm, we can just have them in our head and have them in our mind. You could just go on pexels.com or unsplash.com and just find kind of someone you feel like would connect well with the brand after you've done some research. So of course, with a photo, I like to put a name, give them a name, give them a name that's popular among their age group or whatever we want to do there. And also I love to give them a title. What are they? You know, and it doesn't always have to be a job title. Sometimes it's nice to put a job title, but sometimes it could just be the kind of personality they have. In this case, it's the professional foodie. So she just loves to kind of go out and write about food experiences. She loves food, but it may or may not be an actual title. It could just kind of be a personality type. So I like to list some general facts. So she's has an age, she's 36, she's single, her occupation, she's in banking, and she makes a pretty decent income. And that's really important because people who are making, you know, under 20,000 a year, they may not be our target audience. Those making over 200,000 a year might not be our target audience. So we need to figure out who are we targeting. It's going to really help when we're coming up with marketing campaigns and when we're coming up with social media campaigns. Who are we targeting? This can be really helpful to try to figure this out. Location, she's in the United States, our restaurant is going to just start out in the United States. So it's kind of kind of helps narrow things down for us. Education is important. So she has a bachelor or greater, and that kind of matches up with her income. I mean, none of this is set in stone for her, but it's just kind of helpful to guess kind of the education level she might have. That doesn't mean that we're stuck with only targeting people who have a bachelor's degree. That's not the case at all. There could be multiple user personas in this. This is just one example. So another thing I like to do is talk about their goals in life. What are their goals? And this is when it gets a little bit more creative, that you're kind of writing a story for her. You're writing. It's more, she's just more than just facts. She's more than just statistics. There is a real person who has goals, insights, and passions in her life. And this is where we want to kind of write and craft that story. So for goals, just an idea is a professional who wants to reduce time cooking and preparing food. So she's busy. She doesn't have time to sit here and have a really good food, but she's a foodie and she wants high quality food, but she may not have time to cook it. So that's where this kind of restaurant could really help her, especially with their delivery service. So she desires a high quality, fresh food. Notice the word fresh is in there. You're starting to see these words used repetitively on purpose. She has a desire for sushi and visits a sushi place at least once a week. So she's already kind of a fan of sushi. She understands it already. It's not new to her. She is a foodie by the way, so it all kind of connects. Values. So she wants to have work-life balance. And so being able to get fresh sushi delivered or go for a quick bite to eat at lunch is valuable to her. She also likes health and nutrition and raw fish can be some of the healthiest food in the world, along with rice and the other side items they offer on their menu. This is a very healthy place to eat. Food is an experience and it's not just for sustenance. So this kind of goes back to her personality being a professional foodie. She eats food because she really enjoys it. She doesn't eat it just because it has a certain amount of calories she needs each day. It's an important part of her life and some people are built that way. Some people just love to eat food and I'm one of those people. I just enjoy the eating experience. And so this really helps us figure out who this person is and some of the motivations behind her going out and getting sushi. So everybody in life has problems and that means they have some problem-solving opportunities. These are problems that we can solve with our unique concept and product or service. So if you have a client that walks dogs and you have a problem of not feeling like your pet gets enough attention when you're gone at work, well, that's a problem that I have that you have a solution or product for that can solve it. So that's how you have to think with these problem-solving opportunities. So she wishes she did not have to spend so much time preparing and cooking meals as she already has just a few hours of the evenings to hang out with friends and she doesn't have a lot of downtime. So we're going to be solving that issue by providing a delivery service. She loves sushi and visits two fantastic places in town she thinks has the best sushi. She feels like she is missing the quality component of the sushi she eats. So she's eating at these places that have really Americanized sushi and our place has that unique idea of just really focusing on really high quality fresh fish and not putting a bunch of junk on it and all these other ingredients just really focusing on high quality sushi. So that would definitely solve one of her problems. Another opportunity is she would love to have great quality fresh sushi delivered, but she's a little wary of trusting a local place to deliver it. There's the idea that delivery sushi is not going to taste as fresh as visiting the restaurant. So this could be an educational opportunity for us when we're developing our brand language, we're writing our ad copy. Perhaps we can position our company to resolve this idea that delivery is not going to be as fresh. And so we have to find some way to maybe think about that in the future to say, okay, we are fresh, even though it takes 20 minutes to get to your door. We can use an app called DoorDash, which can really get your order super quick to you and the fish is still going to have a slight chill to it. It's going to be nice and fresh. So that's kind of an education opportunity that we discovered by kind of walking through this user persona exercise. So why do we take the time to put all these user personas together? I like to craft it in a really nice professional way because when I do my presentation to the client a little bit later on, I think this really helps to add a professional layer to my presentation because once again, I'm proving to my client, I'm more than just a graphic designer. I'm thinking about the whole marketing, branding strategy piece, and that's what makes me different. And that's why I can charge a little bit higher prices because I work through all these different steps that other graphic designers are just not doing with their work. So if I can provide this, this is what ad agencies go through, all these little detailed steps. It seems like a lot of extra work, but you can charge more money, you can get bigger clients this way. This is the kind of stuff when you start to get large clients, this is kind of what they're expecting. And this is what big ad agencies try to do as well. So I'm just trying to show you this a little bit more expert level presentation. I think this goes such a long way into proving to the client you're really thinking through this, that you're not developing concepts at random, that there's a process and there's a little bit of order to your creative process.