Is Artificial Intelligence Making Buyer Personas Obsolete?

Artificial intelligence (AI) articles, blog posts and news are everywhere you look today, and rightfully so. AI truly is transforming how every industry does business today. The vast majority of the articles I have read tout the current and future benefits of AI and why businesses need to start embracing AI immediately. And in no industry is this more true than the marketing industry. According to a recent report by Demandbase, 80% of B2B marketing executives predict artificial intelligence will revolutionize marketing by 2020 (Nadjm, 2017, para. 3). Yeah, that's less than three years away! The promise of AI for marketers is that it saves time and money while learning customer habits, preferences and behaviors that lead to smarter, more efficient, more confident marketing decisions.

As a marketing professional, I am a proponent of AI. How could I not be? The idea of collecting, organizing and making sense of hundreds of client touch points, and better understanding pain points and behaviors should be at the heart of every small and significant marketing decision today. Making any marketing decision without research on your target market in mind is foolhardy. As a marketer, you want to be informed about a client’s media usage habits, how and why they make decisions, who is involved in the decision, what topics they want to read about, what agenda items they want to see before deciding to attend an event you are hosting, and so on. Although AI and Big Data can certainly shed light on some of this need-to-know information, it cannot (and will never be able to) replace buyer personas.

 What is a buyer persona study and why it is critical?

According to the best book I have read on the subject, Buyer Personas by Adele Revella, creating buyer personas is a human-based process of conducting one-on-one interviews with customers to clarify their mind-set, understand their complex purchasing decisions, and build three-dimensional profiles of real, human buyers. Note that the word “human” appears twice in the preceding sentence, meaning that a human is actually interacting with another human to collect information…not a robot or an algorithm. Crazy, right?

Buyer personas provide information and an understanding of your buyers that no amount of AI generated data can provide. Information such as:

 ·        Which buyers are receptive, and which will ignore you no matter what you say

·        Which aspects of your solution are relevant to them, and which are irrelevant

·        What attitudes prevent your buyers from considering your solutions

·        What resources your buyers trust as they evaluate options

·        Which buyers are involved in the decision and how much influence they wield (Revella, 2015, p. 13) 

The pitfalls of AI generated data

Being the natural devil’s advocate that I am, I started searching for the antithesis of all the pro-AI marketing articles I was reading. After all, there are two sides to every coin, right? The pros and cons of a decision, product, solution, action, outcome, person, place, etc….The most intriguing article I found was by Martin Kihn, Research Vice President at Gartner. In his interesting article, he discusses the limitations, herd-like classifications (i.e., lack of personalization) and potentially mundane customer experiences of algorithms, the proud first son of AI.

My favorite line in Martin’s article that I feel captures AI’s limitations and the eternal need for human-based, face-to-face interaction to uncover client preferences and behavior for marketing purposes is, “Humans are not machines, and the customer is always right. Too often, the algorithm gets that wrong” (Kihn, 2017, para. 21).

The best marketing decisions marry technology and humans | An investment in technology and time

I am concerned that marketers will now and, as AI becomes more mainstream, in the future, rely solely (or predominantly) on AI generated client data to develop marketing strategies and make important client-centric marketing decisions. AI and Big Data should have a seat at the marketing decision making table, absolutely! But sitting right next to them should be the results of a well-executed buyer persona. The former is in an investment in dollars and the latter is an investment in time. Both are equally necessary capital investments for a marketing department.

When your AI driven data, buyer persona study, primary/secondary research, and Sales and Marketing teams sit around the table to discuss marketing strategy, campaigns, messaging and tactics, a well-thought out marketing strategy that puts your customer at the very center will emerge. Subtract any one of these components, then you are making less than optimal marketing decisions.

Think like your client. BE your client!

 References

Kihn, M. (April 27, 2017). Are Algorithms Ruining Marketing? Retrieved from https://adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/algorithms-ruining-marketing/

Nadjm, M. (April 24, 2017). How AI is bound to change B2B sales and marketing forever. Retrieved from https://econsultancy.com/blog/68986-how-ai-is-bound-to-change-b2b-sales-and-marketing-forever/ 

Revella, A. (2015). Buyer Personas. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons