Using Peronas In Marketing

         I think the most convincing argument for the use of personas from a psychological perspective is given by Mulder et al (2007) in that when designing personas one is required to think outside of themselves and obtain an understanding of who is going to be interacting with the persona.  It is through this process that people can gain a psychological makeup, if you may, of who their audience is and how likely they are to interact with the personas.  Jacobson et al agree with Mulder saying that “he main advantage of working with personas is putting one’s self in someone else’s shoes, (Jacobson et al, 2008, P.3) 

            Mulder et al (2007) suggests that the biggest challenge to creating personas is the fact that it is often hard for us to step outside of ourselves in order to get a clear picture of who we are creating the persona for.  Also, Mulder suggests that research is needed to develop a clear picture of who the audience is and how they will interact with the persona. 

            In the Persona Concept, Toth talks about personas and security, and how personas can be used to assist people with organizing their offline and online personal profiles in one place.  However, this can be fraught with problems – while personas may allow for easy access to multiple platforms however, they are vulnerable to being taken over and if they do, then someone can have access to all of your data.  Toth says “the Persona will need strong tamper resistance, access controls and intrusion detection mechanisms,” and I agree that this is an issue when adapting and deploying personas. 

            Jacobson et al (2008) also discusses how a major pitfall of personas lies within its ability to really relate to the actual user and whether or not it is based on actual research or just intuition.  Also, Jacobson et al (2008) suggests that personas inherently have a drawback in that while they try to represent the user it is often very difficult to represent a user “vividly,” because it is hard to know what is or not important to include. 

            A good example of this give and take is the Enzyte (male enhancement) persona, Smilling Bob, used to sell the supplement.  The upside – he does resonate with people who may actually have those issues.  But the downfall – is that while he may appeal to some people he is also stereotypical and misogynistic and because of that some people will never resonate with the persona. 

 By Ari Benjamin Morguelan

References:

Mulder, Steve, & Yaar, Ziv. (2007). The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web. Berkeley: New Riders.

Toth, K., & Subramanium, M. (2003). The Persona Concept: A Consumer-Centered Identity Model. Paper presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Emerging Applications for Wireless and Mobile Access (MobEA), Budapest Hungary.

Jacobs, A., Dreessen, K., & Pierson, J. (2008). "Thick Personas": Using Ethnographic Methods for Persona Development as a Tool for Conveying the Social Science View in Technological Design. Observatorio (OBS*), 2(2).

SeanBaby. (2009, August 9). Behind The Smile: The Horrible Truth about Bob from Enzyte. Retrieved January 30, 2015, from http://www.cracked.com/blog/behind-the-smile-the-horrible-truth-about-bob-from-enzyte/