Bringing Personas to Life

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How often are you asking, 'What would [Persona Name] want?' in your meetings? And in your boardroom?

Who’s asking the question? Only your customer experience leader? Well, shit.

Here’s the problem: When customer-centricity is seen as an extra-curricular, and not core to the culture, it’s going to fail. The customer is an afterthought – the trash receptacle of bad design and bad process.

Personas are powerful tools for understanding customers, but if they’re not brought to life across your organization, they can become just another box to check.

A customer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents a segment of your target audience, created using real data to reflect behaviors, motivations, and challenges. They’re more than just demographic profiles—they’re tools that help you step into your customers’ shoes and understand their world.

So where do you start?

Show me your personas. If that means you need to dig them out of an old folder in Marketing, we need to talk. Personas should be living, breathing tools that guide every decision.

I also recognize that personas have been butchered in recent years, turned into fluffy stereotypes with names like Interested Irene and Frustrated Frank. When a persona is created without real customer data, without input from cross-functional teams, and without a deep understanding of your customers’ true needs, it’s destined to miss the mark. I’ve written extensively about how to create effective personas and the importance of jobs to be done here.

I’ve also seen what works in the field once personas are created. Here are my top five tips to bringing personas to life:

1) Go big or go home: If most of your company is located together and comes into an actual office, create physical representations of the personas. Full size cardboard cutouts placed around the building may feel a little weird at first, and scare the janitors at night, but they make an impact. I also like the smaller desk-size standup cutouts that can move around conference room tables. And it’s important to have “persona booklets” that have a tab for each persona that are dispersed across the organization and available in every meeting room.

2) Make Personas Remote: With more colleagues working from home, creating impactful remote experiences is just as important—if not more—than in the corporate office. Personas need to come to life digitally. Use Slack? Set up a Slack channel for each persona, with a CX champion responding behind the scenes. Launch a company podcast where you interview your persona (or better yet, a real-life customer) to dive deeper into their world. Or create 2-minute videos that offer a peek into a day in the life of your persona.

3) Manage the Managers: Ensure every manager in your organization knows the personas inside and out. They should help their teams understand what's important to each persona and how their work directly impacts them. Managers are key to shifting the perception of personas from, 'What the heck is that dorky cardboard cutout for?' to the powerful realization, 'Wow, I didn’t realize the impact I have on this customer.' One of my clients knew their personas so well that their analytics team dressed up as each persona for Halloween and stayed in character all day.

4) Keep dripping:  CX teams need to keep personas alive in the organization. It helps to blend a mix of fun activities with practical, everyday applications that keep personas top of mind and guide decision-making.

Examples:

• Employee Putting Contest: Host a competition inspired by the persona who loves to golf. It’s a fun way to engage employees while reinforcing the persona’s interests.
• Cookie Station Challenge: Set up a cookie station featuring the persona who loves to bake. To earn a cookie, employees must answer three questions about the persona—especially focusing on how their work impacts them.
• Persona’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day: Create a scenario where the persona’s world is turned upside down by your company. Have employees brainstorm solutions to fix the situation, with the best ideas winning a prize. This encourages creative problem-solving while highlighting the real-world impact of their actions.

5) Make it Actionable: What’s often missing from the personas is the “Get Shit Done” (GSD) mindset. How do we turn our insights into action? Is that persona’s customer journey mapped and do we know the moments that matter? What’s the elevator pitch for each persona’s specific "job to be done?" How does each persona prefer to be communicated with, and are we actively listening for ways to improve the omnichannel experience? By focusing on these elements, we ensure our personas are not just theoretical but practical tools that drive real, measurable impact.

Bringing personas to life is a critical part of building a customer-centric culture that drives real change. When personas are actively integrated into every level of your organization—whether through fun activities, remote engagement, or actionable insights—they become powerful tools that shape decisions and impact your customers in meaningful ways.

Now, it’s your turn. Take a good look at your personas—are they alive and driving action, or are they gathering dust in an old folder? Let’s make them a living, breathing part of your strategy. Ready to take the next step? Reach out for a free consultation on how to get started.

LoyaltyCraft was built from a passion for helping companies create meaningful customer experiences. Founded in 2016 by Lauren Feehrer CCXP, we focus on strategy, qualitative research, customer design, and employee engagement to help mid-market companies open the door to new customers and keep existing ones from leaving out the backdoor.