---
name: customer-personas
description: Build audience profiles from evidence rather than imagination, capturing the job, the trigger, and the objection. Use when marketing targets everyone and converts nobody.
---

# Customer personas

Personas are useful when derived from real customers and harmful when
invented, because a fictional persona lets a team agree confidently about
someone who does not exist. The valuable content is the buying trigger
and the objection, not demographics.

## Method

1. **Build from real customers, not from imagination.** Interviews,
   sales calls, and support conversations, with quotes rather than
   summaries (see customer-interviews).
2. **Capture the job being done.** What they were trying to accomplish
   when they went looking, which predicts behaviour far better than
   their job title.
3. **Record the trigger.** What changed that made them search now, since
   this is what marketing must catch and it is usually a specific event.
4. **Capture objections and alternatives verbatim.** What almost stopped
   them buying is the material that improves conversion most.
5. **Keep the set small.** Two or three personas can genuinely shape
   decisions; eight cannot and become a document nobody opens.
6. **Distinguish the buyer from the user.** In business sales they
   differ, and messaging that speaks only to one loses the deal.
7. **Update against reality.** Who actually buys usually differs from
   who you designed for, and the data should override the plan.

## Boundaries

Personas summarise patterns and hide variation, so decisions with real
stakes need actual research. Demographic detail is usually decorative
compared to behaviour and context. Personas built from existing
customers describe who you have rather than who you could reach.