Assignment 2 - Personas

Marketers create personas to better understand their target customers and in turn design better products and services. Personas go further than just segmentation. Rather than just looking at demographics, a developed persona takes into account details such as a person’s goals, hobbies, etc. By probing deeper into a potential customer’s life, marketers can discover unspoken or even unconscious wants of an identified persona. Based off of this information, they can then develop and design products and services based off of the research.
Formally, developing personas can be a detailed procedure, such as going through the five stages of conception and gestation, family planning, birth and maturation, adulthood, and retirement and lifetime achievement. In the end though, the idea is to discover insights about groups of people who have unsatisfied needs where a product or service might improve their lives.
To create a persona, a marketer will need a wide array of information on a person. For a start, a description of myself might be a good start for a marketer to develop a persona.
The basics: Bruce is a 21-year old male Chinese-American college student. Currently he is a double major in Marketing and Film Production at the University of Texas at Austin.
Bruce is very independent and goal-oriented. He is passionate about becoming a writer/film director, and is not afraid of the difficult road towards that goal. He does a lot of studying and work outside of class regarding writing and film-making. As a senior in college, he is both excited and anxious about what is to come after school, because as exciting as it sounds, it is difficult to get a start in the film industry.
He keeps himself occupied between school and his own studies because he values his time and wants to use it efficiently. Throughout his career in college, he has become disillusioned with the college degree, and is increasingly questioning the importance of it. He likes to live simply. He spends nearly nothing on clothes, haircuts, or material goods that don’t have intrinsic value. He doesn’t believe in “dress for success,” and in fact has never worn a suit in his entire career in business school. He likes reading, movies, and videogames when he has time. With movies, he hates seeing bad films, so he will usually wait until a film gets some reviews before considering watching it in the theaters. He also likes to keep with technology and new trends, but like movies, prefers to wait for responses from other users before trying a new product or service.
He enjoys hanging out with friends, but does not like bars and clubs, finding them too noisy and rowdy. He likes a wide array of music and arts, but has an inclination towards classical music and traditional art because he was trained in those fields. Usually, he listens to his music on his MacBook Pro. He works out to stay healthy. He likes great food, but as he is on a tight budget now, he usually chooses price over quality.
In the future he would like to learn more about the world, the human experience, and do something he loves. He is willing to take the risk on a more precarious career path rather than a sinecure that he is not passionate about.
Using information like that described above, marketers can discover insights about what products/services might improve Bruce’s life, what products/services that Bruce might be interested in, or staying away from.