Best practices to make personas an effective tool to guide marketing activities by increasing customer understanding and empathy
Updated October 2026 with ICP and AI context. I wrote the original version of this post in 2015 (it first appeared on the OpenView Labs blog).
Personas are one of the most useful tools a marketer has. Done well, they guide almost every marketing activity by increasing customer understanding and empathy. But like any tool, they only deliver value when you get the fundamentals right.
Many marketing teams have personas but very few of them use them well. For some marketers, the concept is somewhat ambiguous or is confused with segmentation or with an ICP. I have seen many persona documents created by product marketing that nobody reads. Here are eight principles that make personas a tool that improves everything marketing does. effectiveness and empathy of sales and customer-facing teams and product management
The concept of personas is not new. It was developed in 1998 by Alan Cooper, who also invented Visual Basic, as a tool to help with software interaction design. In 2002, Tony Zambito developed the concept of buyer personas to focus on buyer behavior and to guide customer strategies.
I used personas deeply in 2004 to guide the global efforts of a Fortune 50 company based in Redmond to help us better understand a specific customer segment. Sometime later I had the opportunity to talk with Tony Zambito at a Denver BMA event sparked this post.
1. Buyer personas must come from Marketing Strategy
Developing buyer personas is not just a step in a content marketing process. Personas should guide all marketing activities, not just content. If the content team owns the job of defining personas in your organization, marketing leadership has not done its job, and your go-to-market effort is in trouble.
The goal of personas is to create customer understanding and empathy across the organization: from engineering and product management to customer service.
Personas are an attempt to humanize customer segments, to make them real. Deciding who your customers should be is a fundamental part of corporate strategy. The essence of strategy is choosing which markets and customers you will serve and how you will build a competitive advantage.
Marketing leadership should own the definition of customer segments and buyer personas. You can’t be a good marketer unless you know who your customer is, why they buy, how they buy, who influences their decisions, what their buying criteria are, and where they go for information. That last one has changed the most: today, buyers are as likely to ask an AI assistant as to search, read analyst reports, or ask a peer.
Understanding customers is the source of marketing’s value to the organization. It is the core function and the number-one priority for marketers.
ICP vs. persona. The most common confusion today is not persona vs. segment; it’s persona vs. ICP. In B2B, an ideal customer profile defines which accounts you should pursue: industry, size, tech stack, signals of fit, etc. In B2C, a target customer profile defines which people you should pursue: demographics, psychographics, behavioral, etc. A persona tells you what the humans look like. An ICP or ideal customer tells marketing and sales where to look. A persona tells everyone helps you understand and persuade the individuals who make the decisions.
Personas paint a more complete and human portrait of your customers than segmentation can. Marketing to “marketing leaders at medium to large companies” gives a marketer or a writer very little to work with. Compare that to Joe, the VP of Marketing at Acme Corporation, which makes rockets and other devices to help coyotes catch fast birds. Joe is far more personal, and it is far easier to imagine Joe evaluating and buying your product.
When you create content, craft a campaign, or define requirements for a new product, it is far more effective to ask how Joe will react than to work from an abstract segment definition. That is the role, and the power, of personas.
2. Personas should be Institutional
For a company to execute, every part of it must understand the core of the strategy: who the customer is and what our competitive advantage is. That means everyone in the company should understand the personas that represent your buyers and your users, which are not always the same people.
Buyer personas should guide all customer-facing activities, most obviously marketing and sales. User personas should guide customer success, product development, and customer experience. The two often overlap.
The risk is that each team builds its own personas based on its own understanding of who the customers and users are. The result is a set of conflicting personas that become noise, and a missed opportunity.
If you sell CRM software, for example, your buyer personas are likely the VP of Sales and someone in IT. Your user personas are likely individual sellers and sales managers, including the VP of Sales. Imagine how powerful it would be if everyone in the company understood those four personas deeply, and that understanding shaped every function.
3. Personas are about focus
The purpose of defining ICPs and Ideal Customer Profiles is to provide clarity about who your customer is, and maybe more importantly, who is not. Focus is most valuable in deciding what not to do. Personas are an instance of the focus that is easy to understand, Personas express who the company is trying to inform, influence, attract, and delight, and implicitly, who is not a target.
An organization trying to be all things to all people is likely to fail. Focus is a simple concept, and an incredibly powerful one.
Back to the CRM vendor: if the company agrees to focus on four personas (sales reps, sales managers, the VP of Sales, and IT), it is implicitly deciding not to invest heavily in reaching or pleasing people in purchasing, marketing, finance, or other sales roles.
4. Buyer personas must include more than the actual buyer.
In almost every buying situation there is more than one stakeholder: there are users, influencers, stakeholders, approvers, and so on. This is not limited to B2B. The process of parents buying a car for their teenage daughter may include the the teenager as the user, one parent may be the approver while another one is a decision maker, and friends are influencers.
After all, there are fewer differences between B2B and B2C than most people believe. It is all really about B2P – business to person. Whether you are selling to a corporate officer making a multi-million dollar purchase or you are 20 something trying to decide what clothes to bring for a party, decisions are complex, influenced by other people, subject to the same psychological biases, and more importantly, often made emotionally, and then justified rationally.
Missing the influencers or the right person who really makes the buying decisions in your segmentation may lead to the wrong personas, which will negatively impact the effectiveness of all the marketing efforts guided by them.
5. Personas must capture emotion and situation.
If the goal of personas is to help marketing teams feel empathy, it is necessary to capture how customers really feel. It important to understand their predispositions, the emotional needs they want to satisfy and the emotions and fears that guide their decisions.
Empathy is understanding, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another person.
It is obvious that customers don’t feel the same way all the time. Their feelings change with their situation. Personas need to be defined based on the context of a specific situation or scenario. Tony Zambito argues the most important thing a persona captures is goal/directed behavior. The Jobs-to-be-Done movement later made the same point: people don’t buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific situation.
Imagine you are a car manufacturer planning a new campaign. Marketing to Robert and Kathy, a couple in their early 40s with a teenage daughter named Julia, is far more powerful than marketing to “American couples in their 30s and 40s with 2.5 kids and a household income above $80K.” But the most important thing about Robert and Kathy is their situation: they are buying a car for Julia, who just started driving. Safety, cost, and letting go are all on their minds at once.
Scenarios (situation, context, and goals) should define personas. The emotions people experience in those scenarios should guide how marketers think about them.
6. Personas should be built from research and experience.
The standard process for building segments and personas starts with research: surveys, interviews, spreadsheets, cluster analysis. In 2015 you could call it a Big Data project to impress the boss. Today you can ask an AI to generate five personas in thirty seconds and impress no one who has ever talked to a customer.
Market research is a fantastic tool, and I have used it many times. I would never suggest a marketer make decisions without data. But it is important to understand its limitations, which I described in The Mirage of Data. Every research project is biased by the questions asked, by which customers respond, and by the biases of the research team.
Personal experience and direct customer interaction are more powerful than research alone. The best decisions are informed by both. And if a key goal of personas is to capture how people feel, most research tools do a poor job of it.
What AI changes, and what it doesn’t. AI is genuinely useful in persona work. It can synthesize hundreds of interview transcripts, call recordings, and win/loss notes. It can role-play a persona so you can pressure-test a message before it ships. But a persona generated by AI from general knowledge is plausible fiction: an average of what buyers like yours might think, with no real customer behind it. It will look polished and feel right, and it will mislead you with confidence. Use AI to process what you learned from real customers, never as a substitute for learning it.
If you don’t have direct experience with an industry and its buyers, work closely with someone who does. Research cannot create empathy. AI tools cannot. Only people can.
7. Personas must be actionable
When you learn a lot about your customers, it is tempting to put all of it into your persona definitions. The result is persona profiles that look like eye charts, with full pages of detail.
With that much information, the rest of the organization either won’t read the personas or won’t remember them. Too much data can kill a persona effort. Does it matter that your buyers have 2.5 kids? Does knowing their favorite TV show help you? Would you market to them differently if you knew their favorite color is blue?
Another risk is creating too many personas. Can your team really develop empathy for 18 buyer personas? How many will they remember? How important are most of those roles to the purchase?
The goal is a balance between precision and usefulness. Capture what is actionable. Which details help a marketer decide what content to create? Which help everyone in the company empathize with a customer in a specific buying situation? What information doesn’t change how we interact with customers at all? This matters even more now that AI makes it effortless to generate pages of persona detail.
8. Personas must evolve – but not too fast.
Your personas must be kept up to date, but they should change only as fast as your customers do: as their situations, goals, and emotions change. Rewrite them every quarter and nobody will trust them. Leave them untouched for five years and they will quietly steer you wrong.
A practical rhythm is to review personas once a year, and sooner when you see signs of drift:
- Win/loss patterns shift, or you start losing to a different kind of competitor.
- New roles start showing up in deals, or familiar ones disappear from the buying group.
- Sales stops recognizing the personas in the conversations they are having.
- Buyers change where they get information, as many have with AI assistants.
- Your own strategy changes: a new market, a new segment, a repositioning.
Betty Crocker gives us a good example of persona evolution. The brand updated the portrait of its main buyer over the better part of a century, each time reflecting how its customers had changed.
The Bottom Line
Personas are tools for developing empathy for your customers. They should be archetypes of the segments your organization targets, as defined by corporate and marketing strategy. A small number of buyer and user personas should be understood across the entire company. They need to capture context, goals, scenarios, and emotions: anything actionable that helps focus and guide the company, including, but not limited to, content marketing.
AI can make persona work faster. It can’t make it real. That still requires talking to customers.
If you found this useful, the same ideas about focus and choosing who you serve are at the heart of my book, OutPosition.