The 6-Layer Target Persona

I get calls and emails from vendors every day pitching me a new service or tool to automate my marketing, to improve my content, to relieve my team of tedious work (and our jobs) and from conferences with sessions on the great new way to leverage the latest (or usually the several years old by the time it hit this conference) tech or trend to reach an audience. They're all trying to build or claim to have, a better mousetrap. The problem is, how well do we really know the mouse?

For decades marketers and businesses have chased demographics. They never really stopped. Every business wants to know how to get o that coveted 18-24 year old audience, despite the fact that they have no brand loyalty, which is fine, because they have no money either. Some are woke and chasing Gen Xers, but it amounts to the same thing; a belief that people of a certain age, or ethnicity, or gender are all the same. Men may be from Mars and women may be from Venus, but not all Martians like sports and not all Venusians are green (or is it red?).

More innovative folks have begun to look at psychographics. As the former CMO of BMW said; "we don't care if we're talking about an 8 year old boy or an 80 year old woman, we only care if they like BMWs."

Psychographics give us a look at the interests, hobbies, sentiment, emotions, etc. of our human mice, but even psychographics fall short. Attitudes and aspirations are one thing, but what is their real world behavior? Their media consumption habits? We need to look beyond just the biological labels and social conversations and understand not only that consumers hate advertising, but why, and what kind would appeal to them. We need to look at what drives their behaviors, not only through self-identification but through predictive analysis.

In 2015, as the presidential race was heating up with 2-4 candidates on one side and a dozen on the other, most pundits, media, analysts and even voters made demographic predictions; Millennials will get out the vote for Hillary, women won't vote for Donald. They were of course, wrong. They ignored real time data, social conversations, emotions, fears, etc. I used social listening tools to see if it was possible to see a pattern that would indicate which direction the country was going. I could see how high the passion was for Trump, how little people were talking about Clinton, and how little passion there was for her campaign. The conversation volume around Trump was enormous. It outweighed even the next most popular candidate (not Clinton) and showed that even in states that were typically won by Democrats, there was a surge of conversation around Trump. And not everyone supported the soon-to-be President for the same reason. Demographics made no difference, drivers were issues, attitudes, and personal agendas (Were they a business owner? Did they lose their job to offshoring or cheap foreign labor?).

Social listening showed a clear primary and general election victory for Trump, but even online eavesdropping isn't adequate to paint a 360? of target audiences. We need to look at multiple aspects of the audience to really know them in order to inform our better mousetrap. People are far more multi-faceted than a 1 or 2-layer level of understanding. So, how many do we need? How about starting with 6?

1. Demographics - /?dem??É¡rafiks/ n. statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it. Characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, age, education, profession, occupation, income level, and marital status, are all typical examples. 
2. Psychographics - /?sÄ«kō?É¡rafiks/ n. the study and classification of people according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research. These can be psychological tendencies, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, etc. 
3. Social Conversations - /soh-shuh l adj. ?kon-ver-sey-shuhn/ n. informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk, in this instance through the channels of social media websites, blogs, forums and comment sections therein.
4. Real World Behavior - /?ree-uh l/ adj. /world/n. bih-heyv-yer/ n. the realm of actual of practical experience, as opposed to the abstract, theoretical, or idealized sphere of the classroom, laboratory, etc. 
5. Media Habits - /?mee-dee-uh/ adj. /? hab-its/ n. the means of communication, as TV and radio, newspapers, magazines, and  Internet, that reach or influence people widely in a regularly followed pattern of behavior. 
6. Personal Data - /,pur-suh-nl/ adj. /, dey-tuh / n. individual facts, statistics, or items of information of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private; medical, financial, work, legal.

In the end, the more you know about the mouse, the better you can build the mousetrap. In the end, you may find that you didn't need a better trap, but that the mouse was lactose intolerant, try peanut butter and dog food.