Defining the Buyer Persona and Presenting Its Use for Marketing Purposes for Effective Communication
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33032/acr.4574Keywords:
buyer persona, online marketing, market segmentationAbstract
The origin of buyer persona modeling is software development, but today this methodology is used in a wide variety of fields, including marketing and communication process planning. Buyer personas incarnate buyers, they are person descriptions that represent fictitious characters, but are based on real data. A picture and a name are usually associated to the description of buyer personas, to facilitate the identification of decision makers with them. The essence of the methodology is to involve effectively the needs of users and customers in the various decision-making processes. Although buyer persona modeling has many similarities with segmentation, it goes far beyond it, the reason being that it does not focus only on demographic data, but on the behavior and motivation of users. If used properly, it can be a very effective tool for making marketing processes more efficient. However, buyer personas also have many criticisms. Several experts stated that the methodology is not empirically supported. Below, we present the methodology used to model buyer personas, and their application in the marketing field. In our article, we also discuss the criticism of buyer personas.
References
Aimé, I., Berger-Remy, F., Laporte, M, E., 2022. The brand, the persona and the algorithm: How datafication is reconfiguring marketing work. Journal of Business Research. 145, 814-827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.03.047
Almádi B. – Csonka N. – Máté B. (2016): Effective Content Marketing In The Food Industry: Functional Food Advertising Via BTL Communicatuon Devices. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference "Contemporary Issues in the Theory and Practice of Management". 13-18.
An, J. – Kwak, H. – Salminen, J. – Jung, S. – Jansen, B. J. (2018): Imaginary people representing real numbers: Generating personas from online social media data. ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), 12(4), 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3265986
Bauer A. – Berács J. – Kenesei Zs. (2014): Marketing alapismeretek, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
Barbour, K. – Lee, K. – Moore, C. (2017): Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study. Persona Studies, 3(2), 1-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/ps2017vol3no2art710
Basak, H. – Kundu, R. – Singh, P.K. – Ijaz, M.F. – Wo´zniak, M. – Sarkar, R. (2022): A union of deep learning and swarm-based optimization for 3D human action recognition. Sci. Rep. 12(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-09293-8
Bias, R. G. –Mayhew, D. J., eds. (2005): Cost-Justifying Usability. Elsevier.
Blomquist, A. – Arvola, M. (2002): Personas in Action:Ethnography in an Interaction Design Team, Proceedings of NordCHI, 197 – 200.
Bødker, S. – Christiansen, E. – Nyvang, T. – Zander, P-O. (2012): ‘Personas, people and partici-pation: challenges from the trenches of local government’, Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference. Research Papers - Volume 1(PDC '12), K Halskov, H Winschiers-Theophilus, Y Lee, J Simonsen, and K Bødker (Eds.), 91-100. https://doi.org/10.1145/2347635.2347649
Bujdosó Z. – Dávid L. –Tőzsér A. – Kovács Gy. –Major-Kathi V. – Uakhitova G. – Katona P. – Vasvári M. (2015): Basis of Heritagization and Cultural Tourism Development, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences. 188, 307-315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.03.399
Cooper, A. (1999).: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing.
Cooper, A. – Reimann R. – Cronin D. (2007): About Face 3.0: The essentials ofinteraction design. In-dianapolis: Wiley Publishing.
Chapman, C. N. – Milham, R. P. (2006): The persona’s new clothes: methodological and practical arguments against a popular method. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Soci-ety 50th Annual Meeting, pp. 634 –636. https://doi.org/10.1177/154193120605000503
Dagustani, D. – Buchory, H.A. – Satya, M.T. – Diryana, I. (2016): The internal branding process: Customer reprofiling and brand positioning (empirical study on traditional snack food in Ba-dung-Indonesia), International Journal of Business, Economics and Management, 2016, 3(2), 18-30.
Floyd, I.R. – Jones, M. – Twidale, M.B. (2008): Resolving Incommensurable Debates: A Prelimi-nary Identification of Persona Kinds, Attributes, and Characteristics’, Artifact, 2(1), 12–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17493460802276836
Goodwin, K. (2009): Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services. Indianapolis: Wiley.
Grudin, J. – Pruitt, J. (2002): Personas, Participatory Design and Product Development: An Inf-rastructure for Engagement. Proceedings of PDC 2002, 144-161.
Heinze, A. – Fletcher, G. – Tahir, R. – Cruz, A. (2020). Digital and Social Media Marketing, Rout-ledge.
Hill, C.G. – Haag, M. – Oleson, A. – Mendez, C. – Marsden, N. – Sarma, A. – Burnett, M. (2017): Gender-Inclusiveness Personas vs. Stereotyping: Can We Have it Both Ways?’, CHI '17 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing, 6658–6671. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025609
Illescas-Manzano, M. – Vicente López, N. –Afonso González, N. – Cristofol Rodríguez, C. (2021): Implementation of Chatbot in Online Commerce, and Open Innovation. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc7020125
Jansen, B. – Salminen, J. – Jung, S. (2020): Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Un-derstanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and In-formation Management. 4(1), 1-17. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/dim-2020-0005
Järvinen, J. – Karjaluoto, H. (2015): The use of Web analytics for digital marketing performance measurement’, Industrial Marketing Management, 50, 117–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2015.04.009
Jung, S.; An, J.; Kwak, H.; Ahmad, M.; Nielsen, L. & Jansen, J. (2017). Persona Generation from Aggregated Social Media Data, 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts, 1748-1755. https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053120
Klepek, M. (2019): Buyer personas: Its use and limitations in online marketing, Marketing Iden-tity, 7(1), 886-896.
Kotler P. – Keller K. L. (2012): Marketingmenedzsment, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
Long, F. (2009): Real or imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, Pro-ceedings of the Irish Ergonomics Society Annual Conference, Irish Ergonomics Society Dublin. Letöltési dátum: 2023.06.06. forrás: https://www.frontend.com/thinking/using-personas-in-product-design/
Li, C., Zhang, Y. (2020): A personalized recommendation algorithm based on large-scale real micro-blog data. Neural Comput. & Applic. 32 (15), 11245–11252. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-020-05042-y
Ma, J. – LeRouge, C. (2007): User profiles and personas in the design and development of con-sumer health technologies, International Journal of Medical Informatics, 82(11), 251-268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2011.03.006
Markensten, E. – Artman, H. (2004): Procuring a Usable System Using Unemployed Personas. Proceedings of Nord CHI, ACM Press, 13–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/1028014.1028017
Marketing Sherpa (2005): How Whirlpool Raised Customer Loyalty by 68% by Revamping its Site Using Persona-Based Design.Accessed. Marketing Sherpa honlapja. Letöltés dátuma: 2023. 06. 07. forrás: https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/how-whirlpool-raised-customer-loyalty
Massanari, A. (2010): Designing for imaginary friends: information architecture, personas and the politics of user-centered design, New Media & Society, 12(3), 401-416.
Máté B. – Almádi B. (2016): A hazai termékek preferenciájának megteremtése online marketing-gel. Európa: Gazdaság és Kultúra = Europe: Economy and Culture, pp. 974–981.
McGinn, J. – Kotamraju, N. (2008): Data-driven persona development, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357292
Miaskiewicz, T. – Sumner, T. – Kozar, KA.(2008): A latent semantic analysis methodology for the identification and creation of personas, Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1501–1510. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357290
Miaskiewicz, T. – Kozar, K.A. (2011): Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes? , Design Studies, 32(5), 417-430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.03.003
Nielsen, L. (2012): Personas -User Focused Design. Ebook, London: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7427-1
Nielsen, L. –Hansen, K. S. (2014): Personas is Applicable: A Study on the Use of Personas in Denmark, 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, 1665-1674. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557080
Portigal, S. (2008): True Tales - Persona non grata., 15(1), 72-73. https://doi.org/10.1145/1330526.1330550
Pruitt, J. – Grudin, J. (2003): Personas, Participatory Design and Product Development: An Inf-rastructure for Engagement, Proceedings of Conference on designing for user experiences, ACM Press.
Pruitt, J. – Adlin ,T. (2006): The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind throughout product design. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco.
Russell, S. – Toklu, C. (2011): Acquiring and Applying Market Knowledge for Large Software Purchases: Products, Personas, and Programs, Knowledge Management for Process, Organizational and Marketing Innovation, 195–215. http://dx.doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-829-6.ch012
Rönkkö, K. (2005): An Empirical Study Demonstrating How Different Design Constraints, Project Organization and Contexts Limited the Utility of Personas, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Big Island, HI, USA, 220a-220a. https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2005.85
Salminen, J. – Şengün, S. – Kwak, H. – Jansen, J. – An, J. – Jung, S. – Vieweg, S. – Fox Harrell, D. (2017): Generating Cultural Personas from Social Data: A Perspective of Middle Eastern Users. 5th International Conference on Future Internet of Things and Cloud Workshops (FiCloudW). https://doi.org/10.1109/FiCloudW.2017.97
Salminen, J. – Jansen, J. – An, J. – Kwak, H. – Jung, S. (2018): Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics, Persona Studies, 4(2), 47-65.
Schafer, J.B. – Konstan, J. – Riedl, J. (2001): E-commerce recommendation applications. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 5, 115–153. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009804230409
Song, C. – Yu, Q. – Jose, E. – Zhuang, J. – Geng, H. (2021): A hybrid recommendation approach for viral food based on online reviews. Foods 10(8), 1801. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods10081801
Terho, H. – Mero J. – Siutla, L. – Jaakkola, E. (2022): Digital content marketing in business mar-kets: Activities, consequences, and contingencies along the customer journey, Industrial Marketing Management, 105, 294-310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2022.06.006
Vincent, C.J. – Blandford, A. (2014): The challenges of delivering validated personas for medical equipment design, Applied Ergonomics, 45(4), 1097–1105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2014.01.010
Wood, M. (2007): Essential Guide to Marketing Planning. England: Pearson Education Limited.
Wieczorek, M. – Siłka, J. – Wo´zniak, M. – Garg, S. – Hassan, M.M. – (2021): Lightweight con-volutional neural network model for human face detection in risk situations: IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 18(7), 4820–4829. https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2021.3129629
Xiang, Z., Kim, S., Hu, C., Fesenmaier, D., 2007, Language representation of restaurants: Impli-cations for developing online recommender systems. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 26(4), 1005–1018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2006.12.007
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Vida Noémi, Bringye Bernadett, Varga Erika, Máté Balázs
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.