This webinar ran as part of Grandview’s Product Management View (PMV) webinar series. It is available on-demand here.

So you want to change the world through product initiatives? Holly Buchanan suggests that by correctly leveraging user personas, you can better define products that your customers love. User personas represent different types of consumers. Instead of trying to figure out how you meet the needs of thousands, you can have a workable number of personas used as a framework which provides customer insight for product development and marketing.

In this webinar, Holly covers what personas are, how they are used, and how to create them. She presents the example of the golf industry, that wants to expand their market with female golfers. They're having a hard time attracting the female market, even though they produce pink golf bags, ladies golf clubs, and fun apparel. Holly's point is that the stereotyped female isn't enough for success. By understanding this market better, they could identify adoption hurdles that could spell opportunity to the one who addresses them.

In Holly's example, she suggests that there is a persona for women in business who feel they miss out on opportunities because they don't golf. They are concerned about golf etiquette and what they need to learn, but this persona is visual. They require something like a DVD teaching by way of example, or even better would be a golf clinic providing hands-on instruction in golf etiquette.  By using a persona, you can define what matters most to that persona and use it to guide product decisions.

Holly makes the point that market research is about "what is", whereas user personas are about what could be, and what is missing. This is a real opportunity for innovation, and product differentiation. We should use personas to:

• Define new product features.
• Create new categorization schemes.
• Create market messaging.
• Create promotions.
• Create content for your website.
• Better communicate with your customers in all front office activities such as support and services.

If the items listed above aren't reason enough to use the persona, she provides examples of how to use personas to grow and generate new ideas.

One of the highlights of this particular webinar on personas is that Holly added a section on how to start building a set of personas and identifying a set of building blocks used to create personas:

• Your best customers.
• User groups.
• The four different personality types.
• Questions.
• Needs.
• Problems.
• Objections.
• Motivators - what matters most.
• How you meet their needs/provide solutions/address their deeper motivations.
• A day in the life.

And as they say, the rest is history. I would highly recommend listening to this webinar if you've ever thought about using personas. You should also check out her book, The Soccer Mom Myth and check out her blog. You can also follow her on Twitter – her handle is @HollyBuchanan.