What is a persona?

This post is adapted from the Using audience personas to improve digital user experience strategy guide, on why traditional audience segments miss the mark and how psychographic personas can lead to success today.

A persona is an abstract characterization of a psychographic market segment.

For most of marketing and advertising history, audiences were segmented using demographics such as age, race, and gender. Traditional audience segments might be “Hispanic women ages 18–29” or “young urban professionals.” But in reality, demographics alone don’t define an individual’s preferences or purchases. Truly meaningful audience variation is based on goals, motivations, and behaviors—and demographics are only important in so far as they impact those deeper traits.

As a result, today’s marketers are less concerned with demographics and are focusing more on psychographics, which transcend superficial boundaries and get down to what truly matters for marketing and design.

Some personas are given names, photos, ages, and even personal interests. In other cases, the personas are more like archetypes, with titles like “Tolerating Functionalists” or “Ambitious Artisan” instead of names. And the persona’s characteristics and content will depend entirely on what’s relevant to the brand, product, or experience in question. But no matter what form they take, all personas are built to accomplish the same goal—to help marketers, designers, and stakeholders empathize with the audience’s needs and keep them in center focus.