I've been working personas for almost 20 years now and I have always had the same criticism: they're oftentimes just pulled out of thin air and are a hand-wavey substitute for a segmentation study. As you touched on, the only information that actually matters is that which predicts relevant behavior (in marketing terms, the segmentation variable). Everything else is noise and should be discarded.
I think Cooper had a big influence on that probably, because he "originally intended that personas be used by people without UCD training."
Curious how you get that "noise discard" when others want it. Do you just say no?
For example, I've also found that marketing personas, at least demographics and attitudes, don't directly help when it comes to brainstorm solutions because they are either too generic, as I mentioned in my post. It's almost like I've combined some part of "task/emotions/social jobs to be done" into a persona document and then just added a name/picture to the customer segment.
I've been working personas for almost 20 years now and I have always had the same criticism: they're oftentimes just pulled out of thin air and are a hand-wavey substitute for a segmentation study. As you touched on, the only information that actually matters is that which predicts relevant behavior (in marketing terms, the segmentation variable). Everything else is noise and should be discarded.
I think Cooper had a big influence on that probably, because he "originally intended that personas be used by people without UCD training."
Curious how you get that "noise discard" when others want it. Do you just say no?
For example, I've also found that marketing personas, at least demographics and attitudes, don't directly help when it comes to brainstorm solutions because they are either too generic, as I mentioned in my post. It's almost like I've combined some part of "task/emotions/social jobs to be done" into a persona document and then just added a name/picture to the customer segment.