Customer persona
A customer persona is a research-based profile of a target customer that captures their goals, behaviours, pain points and context, so teams can make decisions with a specific person in mind.
Also known as Buyer persona, User persona
What goes into a customer persona?
A useful persona covers who the person is (their role and context), what they are trying to achieve, the problems that get in their way, how they make decisions, and the language they use to describe all of it.
Weaker personas stop at demographics like age and job title. Strong ones focus on goals and behaviour, because that is what actually predicts how someone will react to your product or your message.
How is a customer persona different from a market segment?
A segment is a group defined by shared attributes, for example mid-market operations teams. A persona is a single, humanised representative of that group that a team can design and sell to. Corha calls these groups cohorts, and lets you drill into what each one has actually said.
You usually build personas on top of segments: the segment tells you who to focus on, the persona makes them concrete.
How many personas should a company have?
Most teams are best served by three to five active personas. Fewer and you paper over real differences; many more and no one can hold them in their head or act on them.
How often should personas be updated?
Personas drift as your market, product and customers change. Treating them as a living document that updates when new evidence arrives keeps them trustworthy, rather than a slide deck that quietly ages in a drawer.
Put it into practice
Customer persona, in brief
A customer persona is a research-based profile of a target customer that captures their goals, behaviours, pain points and context, so teams can design, build and sell with a specific person in mind.
Yes, when they are grounded in real evidence and kept current. Personas fall out of favour only when they are invented from assumptions and then never updated.
A living persona is one that updates itself as new customer evidence arrives, instead of being written once and left to go stale.
Related terms
- Proto-personaA proto-persona is a provisional customer profile built from a team's existing assumptions and knowledge, used as a starting point before primary research is done.Read more
- Customer segmentationCustomer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups that share meaningful attributes, needs or behaviours, so each group can be served and prioritised differently.Read more
- Voice of customerVoice of customer (VoC) is the practice of systematically capturing what customers say about their needs, expectations and experiences, and feeding it back into product, marketing and service decisions.Read more
- Jobs to be doneJobs to be done (JTBD) is a framework that describes products in terms of the progress a customer is trying to make in a given situation, rather than the customer's attributes or the product's features.Read more
- Ideal customer profileAn ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the type of company that gets the most value from your product and is most valuable to you in return, defined by attributes like size, industry, situation and the problem it needs solved.Read more
- Customer journey mapA customer journey map is a visual timeline of the steps a customer goes through to get something done with your product, from first need to ongoing use, showing what they do, think and feel at each stage.Read more
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