Brand Storytelling and Customer Persona

Have you ever thought about building a customer persona to aid you in your marketing efforts? Not a customer profile mind you, but a persona. There is, I think, a not so subtle difference there. And by no means am I suggesting that you don’t use profiles as well in your marketing efforts.

Here’s where I see the biggest difference. Profiles are constructed from data points. Big brands have been culling them for years from our buying habits, etc. and they continue to hone the science as we reveal more and more about ourselves through the social channels we all frequent. If you’ll go along with the idea that data is ‘science’, then persona might be considered ‘art.’ Most dictionary definitions define it as “a person”, or “a character in a literary work.” What’s a character in a literary work going to do for you and your brand? Hopefully they’re going to help you with your brand storytelling.

There are many different kinds of stories that businesses and corporations can tell, Indeed, there are many that the savvy among them have been telling for years. Some of those stories have even involved branding and brands. But very few have built those stories around the customer. Wait, I hear you saying, just last week we posted a great customer success story on our web site. And those are indeed wonderful stories to tell. They help to give potential customers a feel for your company and for what doing business with you might be like. Casey Hibbard does a wonderful job of helping companies with those kind of stories and her book, Stories That Sell, has just won a very prestigious business book award.

But those aren’t the kind of stories I’m referring to either. The first type I mentioned generally fall under that group of stories known as ‘organizational’ and the success stories are generally referred to as ‘testimonials’. In talking about building a story around a customer persona, I’m referring to the process of taking yourself out of your comfort zone as the company or brand and putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. Last I heard, there were slightly over one hundred definitions for ‘imagination.’ I had the process I just described defined for me as ‘imagination’ by a university professor in the late 60s. In all of my years in business, and around people and story, I still think it’s one of the best. Some people will refer to the same process as ‘empathy.’ I think there’s a substantial difference but that’s not the point here.

By putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you can begin to see and experience the world as they do. You can gain insights into them that you might otherwise not have access to. You can begin to appreciate, from their perspective, how and why they would want to engage with your brand, company, product or service. And from that, you can begin to craft and frame a story from their point of view. A story that gives them the opportunity to connect with your company and brand on levels not otherwise afforded to you through your marketing efforts. Once you have crafted and framed this kind of story, you can use it to help drive the creative messaging for your brand.

In this kind of scenario, you’re the creative writer and your customers are your characters. How well you develop them will determine to a large extent the success of your story. Building a customer persona can help with that. In the next post on this subject, we’ll go through some of the questions you can ask and the steps you can take to build that persona.

Note: While I was writing this, the following tweet came through one of the streams that I follow. If you can develop your characters, your customers, to this extent, I’m certain you’ll have a successful story to tell.