Personas and audience understanding

I love words. I know it is super corny, but one of my favourite lines of the whole Harry Potter series is Dumbledore’s “Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic…”

My journey through any project or creative process often starts with a word and looking up said word in the dictionary.

I find that I often use words with only the vaguest sense of their meaning. Sometimes I’ll use a word, and my wife will challenge me to define it. I always struggle.

So looking up a cornerstone word for a project in the dictionary is sometimes reassuring (“I do know what it means!”) and frequently surprising (“Huh, I never knew that.”).

This week’s word was ‘persona’.

Some definitions for you:

• An individual’s social facade
• The personality that a person (such as an actor or politician) projects in public
• The particular type of character that a person seems to have and that is often different from their real or private character
• A persona is the voice in which an author writes a story or poem
• An imaginary person representing a particular type of client or customer, considered when designing products and services that will appeal to them

The thematic I hadn’t anticipated was the persona’s ‘projection’ element (persona borrows from a Latin word meaning mask or character). Maybe because I am naive, I never considered the person I am at work to be a persona I’m playing. Like many people in agency land, I’ve done the training to work out what ‘colour’ I am and seen how my work personality and home personality are different. But the idea of that work personality being a mask I wear was a new one to me.

There’s something artificial about that concept. I don’t ever feel like Batman, consciously suiting up in the mornings to come and sit in my little office. But I guess that’s why there is an enduring appeal in the double-life of the superhero; it’s the natural personas we unconsciously use brought to the fore and blown up for dramatic effect.

The last definition in my list, personas representing our image of consumers and customers, fits much more snugly into this broader sense of artificialness.

Personas are valuable shortcuts for thinking about audiences (which those of us working at the front of end campaign planning do a lot of). We distil and filter down hundreds/thousands/millions of signals down into a handful of pen portraits. It’s easier to imagine how the ‘Cautious chooser’ or ‘Ambitious adopter’ will act than it is to parse an often dizzying multitude of intersecting data points. But, equally, if our audience personas are too complex, we risk committing the cardinal sin of strategic thinking: over-complication.

The challenge with our personas, those artificial projections representing our particular types of client and customer, is that they can quickly become detached from reality. We need to remember that they are projections and shorthand; they’re not real people. Carol, the cautious chooser from Croydon, isn’t real. Carol is a superhero — a persona blown up to dramatic effect, a fantasy projection of our ideal customer.

What we need, in addition to our helpful shortcuts, is a healthy dose of boring reality. The Bruce Wayne to our Batman personas. And that reality is ideally as unvarnished as possible — based on what your audience does, not what they tell you they do. Because, of course, no one reveals their true self in a focus group or their survey answers. Whether we’re affected by the group dynamic or projecting the person we want to be in our survey responses, there’s always a layer of artifice, a degree of persona involved. To stretch my Batman metaphor towards its breaking point, it’s the public projection of Bruce Wayne that Christian Bale plays in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. The brash, carefree playboy — quite apart from the brooding, sensitive character he is at home.

Can we go deeper, get closer to who our audiences really are? We can certainly try — more and more studies aim to track behaviour by installing software on a device we’re arguably more honest with than any other: our smartphones. Ofcom, in particular, has released some fascinating studies looking at our relationship with news and how little we notice passive consumption via breaking news alerts and other triggers. But even with this ability to view how people use their smartphone daily, some artifice is still involved. Participants in any tracking study know they’re taking part in the study. So there’s always the likelihood that they adapt their behaviour because they know they’re being watched (I’d be stunned if any p*rn usage was noticed during Ofcom’s study).

We know that people behave differently when observed — either by a camera or a person or even stealthy software. But, no matter how deep we try and go, how many layers of the Russian doll we pull away, there’s always another mask.

So how do we deal with the fact that everything we think we know about our target audiences is a mask on top of a mask, an artifice carved from artificial materials?

People may not be honest (consciously or unconsciously) about who they are and carefully manage the image they project into the world, but we can use real-world actions to compare against what people say they do. We generally have some data about behaviour, whether that’s website usage, buying preference or signing up for a product/service. We can compare and contrast what people say they want/do with what people ACTUALLY do. When we actively ask the public about their attitudes towards big tech and usage of their data, they tell us they’re uncomfortable with the status quo. But then, by the same token, they carry on using Instagram / Google / Amazon regardless. Any number of surveys or research reports will tell you that more people than ever care about the environment, yet one million plastic bottles are sold every minute.

If we’re going to build up a realistic, relatable picture of our target audience, we need to consider all of the facets that go into making up a persona. Yes, we need to listen to what people say. Yes, we want to observe their behaviour in specific situations. But we also need to consider the opposites in everything. In choosing a particular persona to represent themselves, what are they compensating for? What are they not telling us? What are they not showing us? There is always a need for counterintuitive thinking. To go back to my laboured superhero metaphor, all our favourite characters have a flaw — often, those flaws tell us more about the characters than anything else. We can’t expect our audiences and their personas to give us all the answers. We need to build out combinations that consider both the people we want to be and the cold hard reality of who we are and how we behave — particularly when no one is looking, and we’re not thinking about the mask we wear.