Maintaining and Refreshing Personas

Throughout our blog series on personas, we have effectively covered the development process from data collection to successful utilization. To wrap up the series, we address the importance of maintaining and refreshing personas.

Having a plan to ensure your personas stay fresh and relevant is essential.  Below, we present a few options you may consider. Be sure to take a close look at Option 3. 

Option 1: Go Through a Full Persona Development Exercise Every Few Years

Having the marketing team completely redevelop personas (and gathering the data associated with that exercise) every 3-5 years ensures that your personas are refreshed as thoroughly as possible. Your customer segments, demographics, behaviors, and thinking may have shifted due to the introduction of new products and branding, as well as broader changes in the market place. It is very important to capture these changes and understand your customers’ evolution over time, and doing a thorough refresh every few years is a great way to obtain this information.

However, the downside of only revisiting personas on these longer intervals is that personas often evolve much more quickly than that. It only takes one new product introduction or one new technological breakthrough to change the persona landscape for a company. Holding on to outdated personas can lead to misguided marketing efforts and antiquated sales techniques.

Option 2: Make Gathering Persona Validation Data a Priority of Your Overall Research Agenda

An alternative approach is to simply understand that persona development is a continuous process and as such, plan to gather the data you need to evolve your personas on an ongoing basis. If your company is developing a custom survey or a series of focus groups to get customer input for a new product, this strategy would dictate the inclusion of targeted queries to understand specifically how the research questions relate to the current personas in use. 

This approach is both efficient and cost-effective. The primary challenges, though, are twofold. First, it can be problematic to commit to including questions into research efforts that are paid for by different stakeholders who may not want to invest in the persona maintenance effort. Second, changes may be so gradual that bigger shifts aren’t noticeable enough (think the frog in the boiling water analogy). However, if senior management is focused on persona maintenance and everyone is bought in, this can still be a very effective means to keep personas fresh.

Option 3: A Combination of Both

The third approach, and perhaps the best way to keep personas fresh, is a combination of gathering ongoing data while also going through a full persona (re)development exercise every few years. Though it might be a slightly less cost effective option, it really does have the advantage of thoroughly refreshing personas as a focused effort, while not missing out on subtle shifts in the market over time, and noting how personas mesh with innovations and other marketing considerations, such as brand value and strategy. 

In the end, no matter what overall approach is chosen, it is important to choose a strategy and deliberately pursue it. It is certain the set of personas that best represent your company’s customers and prospects are very likely dynamic and are prone to change over time. Just as it is important for a company to continually refresh its understanding of the marketplace, it is likewise important to continually refresh its understanding of its customers.

Find Out More

The persona development process is intricate, with many facets to consider. It can be overwhelming to approach this for any company. Actionable Research has experience and market knowledge to ensure this process is a smooth one. Contact us today to get professional, reliable and actionable information regarding the persona development process.

Also, keep your eye out for our upcoming Ebook, “Persona Development: BACKED BY SCIENCE.”