Customer Persona Definition

This post is part of the Brand Messaging for Startups Framework, an open-source marketing project. Contributions are welcome :)

📎 Template: Customer Persona Definition

In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung writes:

Man, as we realize if we reflect for a moment, never perceives anything fully or comprehends anything completely.

He goes on to describe the scientific process of observing, collecting data, using our senses to make sense of the world, and how at some point, we still come up short of full comprehension. This is why humans rely on symbolic representations — our unconscious holds a more nuanced understanding of the world than we can ever grasp based only on a perfect recall of a set of facts. It’s this dynamic that makes personas so powerful.

We create personas by building a body of data (qualitative and quantitative):

• Where do they work?
• What are their job titles?
• How old are they?
• What do they love spending their time on?
• What are they afraid of?

And then we synthesize these facts into a sort of symbolic representation, a composite sketch that allows our entire organization to develop a shared, intuitive understanding of what our customer needs, even though none of us has complete comprehension of the topic. Tom Tunguz puts the value of customer personas in more business-like language: