Knowing your target is a fundamental basis of marketing, an essential step in getting to know your prospects and customers, so that you can redefine your raison d'être, launch new products or crack an insight. But the customer environment is increasingly complex. That's why creating or rethinking a buyer persona is essential if you want to refocus your communication and product innovation strategy around a shared vision of buyers.
Charlotte Courel, Head of the Qualitative Research Group at Adwise, gives us a practical explanation of the opportunities for using personas.
Persona is one of your favourite tools. When do you use them?
A social psychologist by training, I'm passionate about human behaviour. I love turning consumers' words into insights, and proposing concrete solutions tailored to the target audience. Qualitative research is often used to gain a better understanding of targets. But to do that, you need to be able to go deep into their logic. Visit Persona provide an in-depth understanding of the rationales of different consumer groups, by mapping them along structural lines.
At Adwise we are particularly keen on creating persona in our research reports, because it allows us to immerse our clients in their customers' logical worlds, and thus to provide solid, substantiated information on the development avenues to be prioritised during an innovation phase, or upstream of a brand platform. Finally, another example persona are of great interest in the context of customer journeys, as they enable us to tailor our response to each point of contact.
What is the added value of personas for brands in qualitative research?
A persona is a multi-dimensional description of a typical target. It reveals the logic, and therefore the attitudes and behaviour, as well as the needs, motivations and expectations of an archetypal customer. Sometimes targets are described too summarily: "our target is families", which makes it impossible to develop "remarkable" products or campaigns. Our persona allow us to choose the target that best matches the brand's DNA on an attitudinal level. Because to get noticed, you have to choose, decide and simplify, based on a strong insight that is specific to each brand. persona. For example, during a study on retirement savings, we identified a persona This was a particularly constrained and anxious group, made up of women with erratic career paths. By describing their irritants in depth, our client was able to develop not only an offer dedicated to them, based on their own specific characteristics, but also a discourse and communication that struck a chord. Thanks to a good persona a good campaign. For example, the Banque Postale campaign [16 years old] is based on persona clear. In another example, during a preparatory study for brand equity work in the field of household hygiene products, we identified a persona around the aspiration to excellence in cleanliness, in short, the profile of maniacs. Based on this definition, our client was able to construct its own strategic target, i.e. a fictitious profile representative of the target it wished to win over, which helped to reinforce the uniqueness of the brand's positioning. This positioning was transcribed by the agency into a campaign.
In practice, how do you go about obtaining a Persona?
We use declarative and passive data. Passive data includes home observations, the use of projective cards to access a more unconscious register, and analysis of the participants' output. We can then carry out a semiotic analysis of the images collected or even of the photos taken by the participant.
Then we analyse the individuals so that they are both very homogeneous within the group making up a persona and, at the same time, different from other groups, other logics. For example, in the world of humidity, we had two meta-groups, those who wanted treatment and those who wanted well-being. From this we develop strategic planning boards, which will express the territory of each group, the associated brands and products, which will enable us to develop what we call a "Story".
Thanks to persona, Not only can we go even further in our analysis, but we can also transform observed insights into operational responses, whether in terms of positioning or product and service offerings. At Adwise, we develop persona.
To strengthen your brand equity or create new, impactful offers. For us, they are a key element of the quali expert.
