It's time to kill personas

Personas are junk.

It matters not how exhaustively you've researched subscribers. How many customers you've met with red eyes.

Their eyes are red because they're sad you've put them into a bucket.

Personas are dead. And there's a warrant out for the arrest of your marketing director.

RIP

Personas never worked.

You may have had limited experience with them. Knowing they read The Times might have given you some comfort.

But let's not waste another moment fussing over common preferences. Just as many of your customers love merino as cashmere.

Personas as we knew them are pointless.

Fortunately, your eccentric tastes for studying similarities are not entirely in vain.

Personas can be helpful. Just not the way they were.

Context and scenarios

Behaviour is a tricky concept to rationalise.

We all have different desires. Altered perceptions of value.

But we're all human. We all want to spend less time faffing about.

If there's a more efficient way of getting what we want, we'll all listen.

That's why context and scenario-based personas still have a place in the marketing gun cabinet.

The problem is, they're not really personas, any more.

It's about behaviour in a particular situation. How do people react when they are confronted with a specific scenario.

Instead of wrapping your content around Doris, you're ensuring that every piece of content is knitted together smartly to ensure a seamless, frictionless user experience, end-to-end.

Standardising the customer journey to be harmonious with the needs of everyone.

Less persona. More user needs.

If there's a struggle, a challenge, an obstacle, a frustrating moment, it's on you to sort it out.

It's on you to always be testing. Asking, through open questions. Listening. Watching. Responding.

We have customer journeys mapped. We spend hours in the data, understanding where we're coming up short. We don't really care about the triumphs and successes. That's why we're paid. It's the shortcomings that give us the widest smiles.

• Know what detectives do when they crack a case? They work on the next.
• Know what they do when the clues show them where to go to catch the culprit? They remember why they're here. To serve.

I'm the red-eyed guy when it comes to personas. I regret every second obsessing over the five archetypes that made up our customer communities.

Because they didn't. And we were always leaving money on the table by pushing ahead to the detriment of those outliers who in reality made up the majority of our customers.

There's only one way to do business online.

Giving every customer an invisible experience.

By removing friction, and fading away to let them get on with their day.