it, but these failed to capture the crucially important stories revealing how buyers make this type of decision. I've also seen companies purchase oversegmented research that defined dozens of buyer personas, a number that would be feasibly impossible for them to market to with any effectiveness.
In both of these cases, the company had lost its way by focusing on the goal to build buyer personas without a clear plan to ensure that they contain useful findings.
Naturally, it's far easier to make educated guesses and assumptions about what buyers may be thinking based on extrapolations of your own knowledge or intuition. That's certainly how large aspects of the marketing community have functioned for decades. But the climate of social and technological change favors companies that embrace a culture of buyer understanding that allows them to adapt to customer needs. Just consider the major technology players that have receded or disappeared: AOL, Digital, Polaroid, Wang, AltaVista, Netscape, Fairchild Semiconductor, Palm, Sun Microsystems. The list could run for pages. Each of these companies was outrun by competitors who possessed greater clarity about their buyers' expectations.
This book is for marketing executives who wish to avoid that kind of dire scenario, whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. It is specifically aimed at marketers of “medium- and high-consideration” products, services, and solutions – buying decisions that require a considerable investment of your buyers' thought and time. Examples of high-consideration decisions range from selecting the right vendor of capital equipment or picking which college to attend to carefully choosing a new car or the most appropriate location for office space. This decision-making process differs markedly from impulse purchases made in a grocery store or at the checkout register.
When you consider that we want to interview buyers to capture their story, it is easy to understand why a detailed narrative about a choice between exotic vacation destinations would be immensely useful. In contrast, little insight would be gained as a result of asking a buyer to explain why she decided to purchase a particular pack of gum.
Although the Internet has given us instant access to immense knowledge, even the most sophisticated applications of Big Data won't reveal what you can learn by listening to your buyers' stories. Just as there is nothing to acquaint you with a foreign culture as intimately as staying with a native family in their home, the best way to gain deep insight into the mind-set of your buyers is to spend quality time with them.
The buyer persona methodology outlined in this book will help companies avoid the consequences that inevitably engulf organizations that fail to listen intensely to their buyers. In the pages to come I will explain how you can use buyer personas to craft successful marketing strategies based on insight that would otherwise be nearly impossible to acquire. I will show how this can be done without exorbitant investments in money, time, or labor. It just requires adhering to a well-defined process, mastering a few skills, and honing your analytical thinking. This is a craft and a set of skills that can be learned, and this book will serve as your primer for how you or your organization can achieve this.
We've organized this book into three parts. In the first three chapters, you'll learn what a buyer persona is and what it is not. You'll find out why so many buyer personas are not as useful as they should be and what you need to do to ensure the success of your buyer persona initiative.
In Part II, we'll help you decide whether you want to build your own buyer personas or use a third party to do this work for you. You'll learn about every aspect of the methodology that you or your contractor needs to employ to interview buyers about their decisions, collect and analyze your findings, and use these to build insightful buyer personas.
Finally, in Part III, we'll share step-by-step guidance about how to use buyer personas to define your marketing strategies. You'll learn how to rely on buyer persona insights to develop your messaging and marketing activities and align with your sales organization, and in the final chapter, we'll recommend a place to begin and explain our vision for the future role of buyer personas.
We are excited that you share our interest in buyer personas and hope that this book will help you join the growing ranks of buyer expert marketers.
PART I
UNDERSTANDING THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BUYER PERSONAS
1
UNDERSTAND BUYING DECISIONS AND THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE THEM
The launch of Apple's iPhone in January 2007 is now widely recognized as a pivotal moment in the history of digital technology and consumer culture. When it went on sale later that year, customers in the United States and parts of Europe greeted the iPhone with near rapture.
A few months later, during the summer of 2008, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G in a total of 22 countries. But what happened to the iPhone in technology-obsessed Japan is a classic lesson in the importance of deeply understanding the expectations of buyers.
Incredibly, Apple hadn't considered that buyers in the Japanese market might have different needs from U.S. and European buyers. And the results were compelling.
Although demand for the iPhone exceeded supply in many other parts of the world, in Japan the iPhone 3G was gathering dust on store shelves by the close of 2008. Press reports the following spring indicated that Japanese sales of the iPhone were only 200,000 units, primarily to existing users of Apple computers and laptops. This was a country where an estimated 50 million cell phones had been sold the previous year.
With a minimum of research, Apple could have discovered that by 2008 the Japanese were accustomed to using their personal phones to shoot videos and to watch digital TV programs. Yet the iPhone 3G didn't even include a video camera. What's more, Apple could have anticipated the difficulty competing in a market where many phones routinely included chips for debit card transactions and train passes. After all, Japan is a place where trains are a part of daily life, and credit cards are rarely accepted. Debit transactions are the primary currency.
To compound the situation, the iPhone was also more expensive than its competitors in Japan. Perhaps Apple thought that its online software store would be valuable enough to justify the higher price. If only the company had known that its target buyers were reluctant to shop online in 2008.
This was nearly the end of the story for the iPhone in Japan. “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them,” Steve Jobs boldly proclaimed to Businessweek in an interview a decade earlier. Having seen the iPhone 3G, the Japanese market had shown Apple's brilliant visionary CEO what they didn't want, as well as the dangers of relying exclusively on intuition and past success as a marketing strategy.
Luckily, Apple learned its lesson. Four years later Forbes reported that the iPhone 5s had captured 34 percent of the Japanese smartphone market, in a country now widely considered as the world's most sophisticated, advanced, and competitive marketplace for smartphones.
The dramatic difference this time: Apple was keenly aware of what its Japanese buyers were expecting.
Apple is fortunate to be that rare brand with the resources to recover from such a stumble. Nonetheless, it would have been far less costly in terms of time, expense, labor, and brand reputation for Apple to have interviewed Japanese buyers about their smartphone expectations before this launch.
The story of Apple's iPhone launch in Japan reminds us that even the most admired companies cannot avoid one of the most basic rules of business: Know your customer.
Now that customers are choosing how and when they will engage with your sales and marketing efforts, this timeless truth is gaining new urgency, forcing companies to reconsider their approach to discovering and applying customer insight.
In 2012, the Corporate Executive Board's (CEB) Marketing Leadership Council released a widely cited study that concisely defined the problem, revealing that on average, business-to-business (B2B) customers are nearly 60 percent of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a sales representative. There is compelling evidence that customers of business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are equally likely to rely on peers and digital connections to guide their decisions