At Boxes and Arrows Parrish Hanna published a report “how the Arc Worldwide’s Experience Planning group uses storytelling and multidimensional customer-based stories to provide relevance, direction, and resonance in today’s business planning landscape.” This report is about the evolution of personas and scenarios:
“As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by “doing the math,” which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding.
We create personas to build upon that platform by bringing the individuals within those segments to life. These are prototypical, but fundamentally real, stories of the multidimensional lives of specific customers. Of course they can also be about employees, partners, competitive customers, the press, and others, but for simplicity and consistency, let’s call them customers. These are specific customers with names and faces, but they also have an underlying implicit business agenda-that is they may be “the most profitable customer three years from now” or “the customer that we want to align with our brand,” or “the customer that shops for a product online and then purchases it in the store.” Their stories include topics such as demographics and psychographics, but also include mindsets, motivations, perceptions, personal quotes, actions, desires, measurable attributes and more. Their stories are crafted from real-world business intelligence, the sources of which may range from online surveys to channel-specific transactional data to descriptions given by in-store sales associates.”
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Customer Storytelling at the Heart of Business Success
