Where does that added value lie? With customer profiles and personas you have tools to better serve both broader customer segments and individual people (what trend watcher Henry Mason calls the segment of one ). In the book 'Working with personas and profiles. The good of pigeonholing', which I am writing together with my colleague Natanja de Bruin , we use the following distinction:
Profile: tools to serve your customers in a customized way
With profiles you can serve customers in a customized, data-driven and personalized way. You lay the foundation with factual information, with data. You get this data from the systems that your organization uses to record information about your customer, client or visitor and is therefore 'hard', measurable and factually correct. By creating profiles you divide the target group into segments. You do not investigate where the similarities and similarities lie, but rather in which target groups or people differ from each other. In doing so, you distinguish between the people in your target group on predetermined characteristics, which help you in your daily service provision. This gives you handles to determine what you need to do to serve people better and in a hyper-personalized way: concrete products or services or actions.
Profiles allow you to serve customers in a customized, data-driven and personalized manner.
Personas then help you to better empathize with customers. They are always fictional. A persona tells the story of a specific target group. That gives data a face, your customer comes to 'live' more. By outlining the context of these personas and enriching the image of the target group with additional information, you ensure that the people who work with personas can more easily empathize, that they understand more quickly what someone needs. With personas you usually have mainly handles for how you serve customers: treatment, tone of voice , core messages, etc.
A persona tells the story of a specific customer segment and gives data a face.
In other words: personas and profiles are excellent canada mobile number list tools for setting up, improving and renewing services and services.
persona's pigeonholing
Also read: Buyer personas for B2B: 3 common mistakes
The pitfalls of pigeonholing
However, not everyone is convinced of this value. “Archetypes of our clients as a tool to get to know them better? No, we don't believe in that. We don't think in boxes”, is a counterargument that my colleagues and I hear a lot in our daily practice when we propose to develop personas or profiles to gain more insight into the living environment and experiences of our clients' clients.
Usually followed by the following list of arguments: it is outdated, it promotes wrong or at least narrowed perceptions and is at worst even stigmatizing. Sometimes there is a view of humanity underneath (we find everyone equal and therefore do not put people in a box), but more often it is a lack of understanding, ignorance of how it can be done differently or (and that is the deadliest) fear of reputational damage.