154: The B2B Persona Problem

In the age of 1:1 personalization, it might be considered heresy to suggest that persona-based marketing is a false idol. But hey, we’re renegades, so of course we’re going to challenge convention. The idea of personas is not necessarily bad. You can never know enough about your target audiences especially when facing 11-person buying committees as is the case with so many enterprise sales efforts. But there is a big difference between 1:1 personalization and personas, which are often an amalgamation of clichés by job title-- like all CFOs are risk averse and all IT people are data-driven.  Sure, many CFOs tend to be risk averse and many IT people like numbers. Now what?  Does that mean you present you product as the least risky to the CFO and the most data-rich to the IT person?  In a word, no.

As it turns out the different story for different targets approach simply doesn’t work when you’re selling large solutions to large companies and Gartner’s Brent Adamson has the research to prove it. In this episode, host Drew Neisser gets on his anti-persona pulpit by interviewing himself. That’s one less persona to cope with on this show perhaps making the medium the message? Too meta? You decide.