I never understand why we all get so excited and as a consequence mixed up with regard to new words and technology.

If you look up the word persona in the dictionary you get a definition along the lines of

Someone's persona is the aspect of their character or nature that they present to other people, perhaps in contrast to their real character or nature. The contradictions between there private life and the public persona.

We are all three people. The person we are (the real me) The person we want others to see and the person as others see us.

To market to persona's will fall out of favour as soon as marketers realise they are not getting the 'real thing' they are getting imagery which lacks substance and sustainability. In short more persona non grata than the real deal.

So don't look for the 2nd self or the person we want others to see stick to 1st version of self helped by a good dose of the 3rd person. ie The person you are and how others see you leave personas to the dreamers and fantasisers stick to substance.

Persona's or profiles are simply different names for describing segments, attributes or characteristics of subjects - for use in marketing. In B2B most profiling has used a limited number of characteristics to profile, including SIC and number of employees. The term Persona in particular, implies that more attributes are being used to develop descriptions.

Persona is not normally a term that is associated with B2B marketing, however with the rise in interest in the small, self employed owner managed business sector - and the close link between personal preferences and decision making in that sector - and the availability of innovative segmentation systems that cluster groups of small business owners by 'values' - the term Persona is likely to find favour.

Systems like PIC, DNA, BASE and others are critical to developing deeper understanding of customers and prospects. Without this insight it is impossible to develop really effective or creative relationship marketing programmes.

There are still few established B2B segmentation systems commercially available - but companies may well have developed their own systems based on their own data. These bespoke systems are a positive step forward however they will generate even greater value when combined with the commercially available sytems, - that classify the whole B2B Sector.

We spent a fortune and almost a year researching personas globally - I think we had 72 at the peak....the descriptions include things like what they watch on TV and popular pets...it was all terrifically stereotypical.....geeks watched Battlestar Galactica and kept snakes and FD's watched the News (BBC of course) and had a dog....eventually we decided that 72 personas was not particularly viable and so consilidated down to 3 broad groups which were exactly the same as the initial database categorisations we had the preceeding year.

In summary, for us, expensive, time consuming and a total waste of money.

A much better approach would've been to augment our existing data with information and systems to enable us to segment and model our data to identify top perfoming, common charateristics that we could've actually bought additional data for....though having said that it'd be great if someone could sell me the list for snake-charming nerds wearing yellow tank tops...

Profiles, in data terms, are nothing new. As marketers identify customer types and segments, ‘profiles’ can be built to help identify and highlight those key attributes which can in turn be identified in a prospect audience. This approach can result in more refined targeting, and a higher return on investment, because those prospects that are most similar to existing customers can be identified and communicated with.

The phrase ‘persona’ can also be used to describe a more human-led approach, where data and analytics help to identify customer types, and the most relevant messages and channels that should be used when communicating with them.

Underlining any analytical approach must be good quality data. If data is out of date and not up to scratch, the development of a profile or persona is likely to be inaccurate, and will result in any subsequent marketing spend being wasted.

Persona or profile? This is almost akin to describing FAB (on a brochure) [persona] and list you send it to [profile]. OK, a bit glib, but I don't think the process is a "total waste of money" if the company uses the information correctly.

When you write sales letters and brochures, almost every time you think yourself into the mind of the segments you will get better results. I recently invested a lot of time on a segmented campaign for a client which deliveered very impressive results by focusing on personas and their needs. To be honest, I was very surprised myself at the results - but they were impressive.

However (and crucially), a persona doesn't stand still. If you waste hours developing personas but then never building on them, the persona becomes a redundant target. For example, think of a lawyer "persona" and then think of the impact of the Legal Services Act which is changing the whole legal landscape. These guys have a very different persona than they might have had a few years back.

I thnk the problem for marketing departments and agencies is that the larger they get, the more customers they have. Result (as "anonymous" describes): too many personas!. However, this is where more savvy businesses begin to look at the profitability of the segments they serve. If, after analysis, certain segments are shown to be fickle, price-buying fly-by-nights, then these should be abandoned to other companies who want to waste their time and money serving them.

An additional problem for companies is that they often don't want to invest in marketing initiatives which don't appear to deliver immediate results. Typically, these are companies who pay lip service to marketing and pull out when the going gets tough. This is a problem for the data-focused marketer who follows a disciplined line to achieve controlled performance.

Marketing gets more like rocket science everyday...

Profiles or personas are an aggregated and informative way to look at a set of typical customers using segmentation. Segmentation filters all customer groups into as few sets of similar customers.
These are very useful because they can steer the thinking of a marketing department and tangent departments.
To get them right they should be
o based on various data sources (brought together by singe customer view) – data rich
o memorable
o stable but updatable
o targetable (you can base campaigns on them to get more insights)