Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to our segment today which is on Persona and Persona Developments. My name is Clay Dutloff. I'm the Senior Vice President of Insights and Innovation for the Qualitative Group here at Decision Analyst. Again, today we're going to be talking about personas and I think personas in essence is just bringing the segments to life. It is taking those segments that have been developed in the research and helping to make them actionable within the organization. A lot of times I think what we've found is that segments and segmentations when they've been done they get put on a shelf, if you will. I was recently with a client and about five or six years ago they had done a segmentation and we were in the process of doing a new segmentation and as we were talking to them they said, you know, they knew that they had these segmentations done. They knew what the segments were called. They didn't know what to do with them. Matter of fact, he just kind of reached on the shelf, pulled out a binder and said here's the segmentation that we had done earlier. They had not done any kind of a persona. They didn't know who these people in those segments truly were and I think that's one of the key pieces that is needed when you move forward with a segmentation study. Personas really help to diffuse the learning throughout the organization. They give you something that you can put your hand around, something that you can really kind of grasp the meaning of. They also help to internalize these customer segments throughout the different organizations that are in an organ company or organization, whether it's marketing, whether it is sales, whether it's operations. These personas give everyone something common that they can talk about. Most of an organization is not a researcher and so kind of the idea of simpler is better really is a key point and a key thing that we try to stress with our personas. I like to think of personas really as just kind of shaking hands with your customer and getting to know them a little bit. Who is the person? What do they do? What are they like? And really kind of importantly kind of getting under the hood if you will and understanding what motivates them, what makes them tick, why they're using your product or service, why there are barriers to using your product or service. Another key thing I think about personas is for me they really act as a gut check or a disaster check if you will. They help to avoid confusion. You know a lot of times these segments are developed and it's hard to kind of get your head around. Personas once they're developed they really can help tell why one segment is different from the other. They can really bring those segments to life again and they can tell you where there is overlap between the segments. We've done some work a couple of weeks ago actually with a client that had a five segment solution had been developed and after the personas were developed and after the persona interviews were conducted we found there were really probably four segments that were actionable. That two of the segments could be combined and I think that's important and a nice result of persona development. It really does ensure that those segments are accurately portrayed and that they can be reached the way you want to reach them. I think one of the fun things about a segmentation persona is that it is something that is kind of internalized within our client organizations and it's just fun to see when you're in the back of a focus group room for example our clients will sit there and they'll be talking about respondents who are in the focus group and they'll be like oh this is in that segment or oh that person's definitely one of these segments and actually I think one of the most interesting pieces happens when they're like I don't see how that person is in that segment or that person's not quite what I thought that segment would be like because I think that's where good conversations and good discussions happen and it just helps to make everyone in the organization as well as us a little bit smarter. When we do our persona development we really kind of use a combination of in-depth techniques and in-the-moment techniques and I think it's this combination that really kind of helps to understand the perceptions, the motivations, as well as the actual behaviors that are happening within these segments. We'll often use webcam IDIs for example in combination with a virtual ethnography where we are viewing you know behaviors or purchase occasions that the respondents are going through. We can use an in-person focus group, we can use an in-person IDI along with an ethnography for example. We do quite a bit of ethnographic work in our persona development and again it's the ability to see the behaviors as well as those motivations that consumers have I think that are key. One of the things I think that's important also with personas is kind of as we mentioned earlier you got to make them as simple as possible. The simpler that are, the more straightforward they are, the more utilized they are within an organization. Two of the best ways I think that we found to help simplify our personas are what we call one pagers and these just have the key elements of the persona on it. They have maybe a picture or a caricature of the person or persons. They have the key information, the likes, the dislikes, what their motivations are for example. Oftentimes we've had these one pagers put in a poster format that are hung within someone's office or in the halls of an organization for example. Another very effective way that we've had to bring those personas to life is through the use of video montages and video montages are a great way to keep our clients attention to make sure that they understand all the aspects and to really bring it to life. We can use videos for example of the respondents in a montage. We can also include those key points that really will help to disseminate that segment and that persona throughout the organization. In closing I think that segmentations are critical for an organization success and I think that when we are able to bring those segments to life it helps to be able to better utilize the segmentation. It helps to have everyone within an organization be on the same page about who those segments are and what the importance of those segments are. I want to thank you for listening today and hope you will be available for our next segment on geomapping. you