Comments on: How Kristine developed a great buyer persona

By: Product Marketing Manager Job Description

Product Marketing Manager Job Description — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 06:24:51 +0000

Kristine, really has some leadership quality’s. Thanks for sharing this informative article.

By: Jordan Jumpman

Jordan Jumpman — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:16:22 +0000

Always be the first to congratulate an opponent who succeeds, the last to criticize a colleague who fails.

By: Luke Faccini

Luke Faccini — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:35:02 +0000

That is an awesome process. Noted and will definitely use it! Well done Kristine.

By: Don MacLennan

Don MacLennan — Sun, 23 May 2010 08:21:45 +0000

Forget sharing Kristine’s persona. Give us her contact details! We should all want to hire people like her…

By: Adele Revella

Adele Revella — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:49:37 +0000

Unfortunately Kristine’s company would never permit us to share the persona with you. None of the insights in that document are about her product or company, so there is nothing to “anonymize.” Instead, all of the content in that persona is a source of competitive advantage to Kristine’s company — they now have a better understanding of the IT architect’s priorities and frustrations. They certainly wouldn’t want that information to be available to anyone else.

By: Adele Revella

Adele Revella — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:46:03 +0000

In response to “the other Kristine’s” question about user personas, those personas are developed to guide design decisions for a product. Alan Cooper, author of “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” wrote the book on user personas in 1999, and many development teams have adopted his excellent recommendations. When product developers build user personas, their products are more apt to be easy for real users to use.
Buyer personas, on the other hand, are only built for the user of the product when the user is also the buyer. B2C products are usually purchased by the user, and thus the buyer persona and the user persona could be developed for the same person. But the buyer persona for that user would focus exclusively on the buying motivations and buying process, rather than the usability issues.
In B2B companies, it is frequently true that the users are not the buyers at all.
In any event, the content of the buyer persona document is completely different than the content of the user persona document.

By: Adele Revella

Adele Revella — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:39:38 +0000

Aaron — Kristine says she spent about ten hours on this project, beginning to end. Five interviews is enough to give us some insight into the buyer persona, but if we were making critical decisions based on the persona we would want to do more, and for complete confidence we would follow up with a quantitative survey to validate our findings.
The only qualification she used for the interviews was that the person she was interviewing was in the role of senior IT architect in an enterprise company. Had our persona been more narrowly defined (such as in a particular industry) she would have added that qualifier.

By: Bruce Olsen

Bruce Olsen — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:36:42 +0000

Would it be possible for you to share the buyer persona Kristine developed–anonymized as necessary?
Thanks!

By: Kristine (yes, really)

Kristine (yes, really) — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:58:33 +0000

I frequently design user personas for websites and applications, and often must clarify the difference between marketing personas and user personas for my clients. What is the difference between marketing and buyer personas?

By: Aaron

Aaron — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:33:42 +0000

Thank you for the tips! I had few questions, though, if you don’t mind:
Can you tell us about how long it took Kristine to complete the personas using these steps?
Also, do you feel you got a representative sample using 5 interviews?
How did Kristine “qualify” the interviewees before setting up the interviews?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!