Most audiences are made up.
Most audiences are made up. Personas with names and photos and weekend hobbies. Real audiences cluster on three or four observable behaviors. The rest is theater.
The persona document is a 2010 artifact that survived because it produces a deliverable the team can hand to the creative department. The deliverable feels rigorous. The hobbies and the morning routines and the favorite podcasts give the audience a face. The face is mostly fiction.
The buyers a brand is actually trying to reach are not described well by hobbies. They are described by behaviors. Specifically, by the behaviors that distinguish them from buyers the brand is not trying to reach. A persona document that does not include the buyers being excluded is a description of everyone, which is a description of nobody.
The behaviors that matter are observable. Did the buyer search for a specific category of solution in the last ninety days. Did the buyer attend a particular event. Did the buyer leave a previous solution and what they said when they left. Did the buyer share a specific concern in a customer service ticket. Each of these is a real signal. Each one can be verified against actual data. None of them require a persona’s name to be Sarah.
The reason persona documents persist is not that they work. It is that they produce a deliverable for the meeting. The agency presents the persona. The client team nods. The persona goes in a slide deck and the deck goes in a folder. The campaign that gets built later sometimes references the persona and sometimes does not. The campaign performs the same in either case because the persona never affected anything.
The teams that have moved away from personas have replaced them with behavioral cluster documents. Three or four observable patterns. The rules for identifying buyers in each pattern. The implications for messaging and channel. The document is shorter than a persona. It is also actionable.
Stop naming the personas.
Stop giving them photos.
Find the behaviors.
The audience is the behavior.