Did Your Segment Persona Limit Your Solution’s Value? Probably.

David W. Norton, Mary Putman, and Aransas Savas

Personas that focus too much on the who and not enough on the situation almost always negatively impact the solution’s value.

John, the Upskilling Man

“John, the upskilling family man, is 38 years old, married, and likes to travel. His dream is to create a better life for his family. He values hard work, honesty, convenient shopping, and time with his kids. His weekends are packed with soccer games and food outings. And he prefers to handle several shopping errands at the same time.”

So might the segment persona description for your latest shopping solution begin. And at first glance, you might be tempted to say, “I know who the target audience is. I can design for him.”

Isn’t that exactly what we want? Clarity about the ‘who’ so that we can build the ‘what’?

Let’s step back and take a look at what role personas actually play in the solutioning process in retail.  

Why We Have Personas

Persona development has been a part of design thinking methodologies since the beginning. Originally, they were built by design researchers for designers to ensure that, as decisions were made about the solution, the ‘customer’ remained in the room. Those in charge of inventing new solutions had a tendency to design those solutions for themselves, often inadvertently. By telling a story based on the lived experiences of real people, design teams could stay focused on supporting the customer rather than the company or their own personal needs.  

Today, personas are often built based on segmentation research that is more akin to marketing segmentation than design research. And the purpose of the personas has changed. Instead of focusing the mind on the real, lived experience of a user, they instead serve to ensure that there are enough like-minded people in market to benefit from the new service. We call these personas, ‘segment personas.’ But another, more accurate name for them would be ‘target audience.’

‘Upskilling John,’ an example we borrowed from an Internet search on personas, feels like a segment persona. His values are broad and generalized. He’s a construct of a lot of averages built from multiple demographic and attitudinal surveys. And retailers today must seriously ask themselves, “can we afford to narrow our focus on Upskilling John?”

Segment personas can create stereotypes about your customers and lead to a proliferation of channels, making channel design more complicated. But the biggest challenge is that they can distract the company from focusing on the job the customer wants to get done.

Let’s imagine for example, that you are a retailer who provides both convenience and pharmacy products and services. You provide online ordering, brick-and-mortar, and same-day delivery conveniences and prescriptions. For each of these channels, you create a segment persona that shows the percentage of people who are likely to order online, choose to drive by, or follow a different journey. According to this logic you should have a major advantage over stores that only provide brick-and-mortar or online ordering. Right? You can support the needs of Upskilling John (34% of your market), Searching Sally (25% market share), and Frantic Frank, who simply drives by and stops because he’s always forgetting stuff (31%). Your competitors can only support Searching Sally. So all of these channels make sense.

Then Amazon opens up Amazon Pharmacy and you see something strange: you lose share across all of your segment personas. 

When we look closer, we often realize that what we’ve created is complexity, not choice. And Amazon is really good at one thing: getting items bought to people’s homes. That doesn’t feel complex. It just gets the job done. In real decision-making, most people will choose the solution that works right most of the time.  

Focus on the Situation

Are we suggesting that you shouldn’t provide a multichannel retail experience? No. We are suggesting that your confidence in your segment personas can lead to astray. Instead of designing solutions for stereotyped segments of the population, we suggest that you focus your solutioning and channel strategies on the specific situations your customers find themselves in.

Situational analytics and design focuses on the unique situations that arise and cause people to want to behave in a certain way. Instead of focusing on what people like Upskilling John prefer, the approach focuses on situations in which people in general need a particular solution. You can aggregate situational needs in a similar fashion to the way you aggregate customer preferences. But you ask a different set of questions. Instead of trying to understand who the customer is, you try to understand the how, when, what, and where for regularly occurring situations. Instead of saying that this segment prefers brick-and-mortar channels, you study what happens on a Friday night when a parent has an emergency need for a prescription. Or how do people behave when they remember they need to renew a prescription. Then you solution to solve those challenges. The more situations you can solve for, the more value you create for the customer and for you.

Many retailers use ‘mission’ thinking to help them understand the unique requirements that specific types of shopping require. We recommend turning your mission research on steroids. Combine mission thinking with situational analytics to identify as many unique opportunities to serve your customers. Then, align your channel strategy to support those needs.

And keep those segment personas somewhere safe. In ten years you will want to pull them out and share them, as part of story about how your company evolved to truly focusing on specific customer needs.

Dave Norton, Ph.D. is the Founder and Principal of Stone Mantel, a research-led consultancy at the forefront of customer and employee experience strategy. With the support of lead experience strategists like Mary Putman and Aransas Savas, they guide, research, and build frameworks to help companies like Marriott, US Bank, Best Buy, and Clayton Homes deliver on Time Well Spent for customers and employees.

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