Why Personas Drive Success

Creating personas or fictional representations of customers gives clarity to user needs as early as the product blueprinting stage.

- Dan Adams & M.Muneer

Given that three out of four new products fail dismally in the industrial or the business-to-business (B2B) market, there has to be a better way to developing new products. We outline a model that may not seem hugely significant at first, but it is both effective and powerful.

When companies attempt to design new products, the difficulty is to get the combined marketing and development teams to agree on decisions. Poor decisions result in sub-optimal products that are either too expensive or useless in terms of value addition. Poor products destroy resources, brands, companies and careers. So, the use of personas is a new way to keep customers in mind throughout the development process.

Personas are hypothetical archetypes of real persons, and we essentially define them by their objectives, which means the ‘job to be done’ (JTBD) by each category. In brief, a persona will represent the individuals within a market who seek to accomplish the same task, solve the same problem or achieve the same goal. But rather than branding them as soccer moms or metrosexuals, we give them identities so that we can easily empathise with their issues.