Personas are Not Pieces of Pie to Slice

At Product Camp Boston this past weekend I offered a presentation on Personas. In this presentation, the differences between market segmentation and personas was discussed. It bears repeating here.

Simply put, a market segment is defined by physical characteristics – like demographics, things that can be easily extracted from a database and sliced into various views. Personas, on the other hand, are behavior-based characteristics, they’re tougher to extract, harder to measure and much more valuable because understanding user and buyer’s goals, attitudes and behaviors leads to better designed products, more targeted marketing efforts and ultimately, more sales.

Sometime the user’s and buyer’s behaviors are not easily categorized, or even rational, but to understand how the market will react to your new product (or feature) is to overcome potential barriers to the identification of the product’s value, and to the sale. You can often put these behaviors into groups or categories, but if you can put them into a database and slice the data, you probably have segmentation data.

Often some demographic data wanders its way into the persona description – leading to confusion among first time persona “gatherers”. (I was tempted to put persona “writers”, but these personas are not fictional works). Looking in from the outside, it is fine to include the demographic data as a way to set the persona stage; but, the value of personas is in the goals, attitudes and behaviors.