Understanding the Key Differences Between Market Segments and Personas (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So, let's get into kind of a hot topic, which is about the difference between market segments and personas. And there are some similarities, but actually they're quite different from one another and I often see them get confused and used for each other's purpose, which tends to lead to problems because they are designed with different goals in mind and are based on different information. So, let's look at what makes them similar, but also what makes them different and how to use them. So, market segments are based around quantitative data, looking at things like demographics and people's buying patterns and preferences, maybe what they would pay for something, things of that nature. It's typically based off of a survey or some other large data set, for example. And the typical audience for a market segment is, not surprisingly, marketing. Personas on the other hand are based off of qualitative information, typically doing things like ethnographic research with customers in their homes or in their workplaces, whatever the case may be, and getting a very in-depth understanding of how they behave, how they feel, how they think, what their goals are as they're trying to use a product or service along the lines of what you're building. And the primary audience for a persona is the product design team, so designers, developers, engineers and so on. Now, where you run into problems is when you're trying to use one for the other's job, because there are some similarities and there are differences. This book here, Designing for the Digital Age, by Kim Goodwin, goes into this distinction, has a really good graph that talks about the difference between them and also where there's some similarities, and has a ton of other information about how to put together personas as well as a lot of other stuff in the design process. As you can see, it's a very large book, just a wealth of information there. To grossly oversimplify, probably, market segments are about buying before use, and personas are about behaviors after purchase. And segments are kind of reductive. They're about saying, focus on this, not on this other segment, whereas personas are really intended to be generative tools, so they're about helping the product design team come up with new ideas for features, and to explore ways that you can help customers meet their goals, and where you tend to run into problems if you're trying to use one for the other's job. So, for example, if you try and use a market segment to do the job of a persona, there you're going to run into problems, because that rich information about the behaviors and the emotions and the goals just isn't there in a segment. That's not the data that it is drawn from. And so you can't use it really very well to come up with ideas for new features, or to prioritize those features, or write user stories if you're in Agile, for example. By the same token, you don't really want to use personas to do segments, because there isn't a business case around a persona. A persona has nothing about how many of these people there are out there in the world for you potentially to sell to. There's nothing about really how much they would be willing to pay. That's just not what they're for. And so you really need to sort of think of these as having two different things, even though superficially they're both about the customer, and trying to understand the customer. They're kind of coming at it from different angles. They're based on different information. Really they're very complementary to one another. And I think you should have both, but really try and avoid using one for the job that the other is intended to do. That's just going to cause you problems. So do both, and then you'll be in much better shape.