The importance of persona mapping
Make sure you always know who is important for your business strategically
Imagine you have one day until Christmas eve and you don’t have any food at home. Well, shops are going to be closed for a couple of days too and you somehow need to make sure you will have fancy meal on the table that you can enjoy together with your family.
You haven’t done any shopping at all yet. But you did this on purpose. Because recently you’ve subscribed to a premium service at the online supermarket you usually use to do your shopping. And this premium service guarantees that you get your order delivered even if you order on the same day. This is the reason you can now lean back on the couch and start thinking about what you need to order only 1 day before the Holidays without freaking out.
But what if you cannot order for the same day as promised? Would you start panicking? I definitely would… Would you let the online supermarket know about what happened? I definitely would… What would they do then? How would they solve the situation to make sure you keep them in mind next time when ordering? Well, it depends, maybe they don’t really want to make sure about this.
Which type of customers a company is focusing to depends on many things, mainly on their business strategy.
One of the biggest mistakes companies can make is that they have differentiator value proposition for certain customer segments but they don’t learn about these type of buyers. It can lead to serious problems if you have a value proposition to a customer segment you want to please the most (according to your business strategy) but you don’t look deeper into persona’s characteristics…
For some businesses it is so easy to find out more about the customers as they themselves are also customers (or it is so easy to become one). For instance online shopping domain is like this, especially when it comes to food, right? Let’s just stick to the above example (at the beginning of the article). An online supermarket serves eco-friendly customers as well as premium customers (for an extra monthly fee) besides obviously the people who simply like to do their shopping online. If we take a closer look at the premium shoppers, for the premium monthly free there are couple of extra discounts as well as extra services like guaranteed delivery the same day the order was placed. Who are the people who subscribe to this premium package? What do you think? Yes, exactly, they are people for whom their time is more important than money. They neither like to spend hours in a supermarket nor sitting in a traffic jam heading to a supermarket. These people don’t even want to spend too much time with planning their shopping ahead as they know that they subscribed to a service that requires them to think only half a day ahead.
Let’s imagine that this service is stalled for some reasons. Or more times slipped and haven’t performed properly. What would you do to keep premium customers and prevent them from using the competitor’s product instead? What if you would apologize and offer them to reimburse premium subscription fee for the month? Do you think this is a proper way to handle this in terms of premium customers? 🤔 Well, maybe. Or maybe not.
Persona mapping is a great exercise to map out the different personas who are using / likely going to use your product (for persona discovery you can use Miro’s built in templates). Based on what I wrote above (about the premium users and their goal with the product and why they are using it) it is unlikely that these premium users won’t leave because they got the subscription fee reimbursed. They’d just probably be more pissed as the service is not performing well and the mitigation is simply to reimburse the money. They want to rely on the service they subscribed for and they’d even be willing to pay more if the service was reliable.
However on the other hand it can happen that your strategy is to satisfy as many customers as you can (and not focusing on keeping the premium ones for instance). Then you can keep reimbursing premium fees for those premium customers who are complaining and optimize your delivery services to cover as many delivery addresses as it can in a timeframe. Here you also could think about highlighting the eco-friendly side of it and make sure the eco-friendly customers hear this 🙂
See how different it could be? What you need to see here is that you really need to have a business strategy (a conscious one not the “go with the flow” one if possible) and you need to make sure that from time to time you reflect and reconsider.
And never forget to get know your customers better. At every business decision you need to revise which personas are affected by that decision and whether you still serving each in a way you intend to. It also can be a business strategy decision to change focus completely and serve a new segment, it all depends on what you as a business want to do.
If there is a chance that with a new direction or capability you could increase more of your targeted customer segments’ satisfaction level then do not hesitate to map out which are these benefits these personas share and start the planning there.
When learning about your personas always think about why they would pay for your product and what they would use it for. These purposes can be quite different on a persona basis. Always remember to check from time to time whether you continue to provide the value proposition to your customer segments and identify gaps where you need to improve (Value Proposition Canvas is a great exercise to identify these gaps by the way).
Also, what I really like to do when doing persona maps is to add avatar (even showing their assumed expression on their face in different situations when using my product). Here is a great tool I really like to generate avatars with. Obviously if you are lucky and you have a concrete persona already use their profile!
And the other very important thing is to name your persona. Later in the workshop or any occasion your team is crunching the user stories it is much better and more effective to refer to a persona by their — even fake — name.
Just think about the product you are working on for a second..Do you have a persona map for it or could you put one together? It is a great exercise, even a team building activity from a certain aspect, and you’ll be surprised how much you will learn whilst you are discovering who and why is using / would use your product.
