Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Part IIIAligning Your Strategies to Win More Business

Now that you understand the attributes of useful personas and the methodology to discover Buying Insights, we want to be sure that you have a clear plan to use your insights to guide your marketing decisions. Your buyer personas are a marketing tool—a means and not an end. We hear from marketers every day who are responding to a directive to build buyer personas, but they can't tell us how they will be used.

Harold Geneen, the twentieth-century business executive whom the New York Times compared to General George S. Patton, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, reflected on strategy with these words: “You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.”

We built the buyer persona methodology because we knew precisely what the end result needed to be. Our vision didn't begin with the goal to invent a new research methodology or to understand buyers. Instead, we realized that marketers of high-consideration products needed the insight and confidence to build strategies that would help buyers choose their solution. So we invented a methodology that would provide it.

We've been worried that thousands of marketers may be building ineffective buyer personas, publishing them on their intranet, and then letting them drown in a sea of PowerPoints that no one can recall. So when we saw that Dan Staresinic, a senior marketing executive at one ...