Best Practices

Confusing Customer Segmentation, Buyer Profiling, and Buyer Personas Harms Marketing

In the 15 years since originating the concept of buyer personas in 2001, there has been one issue that continues to plague fully understanding exactly where, how, and why buyer personas can be beneficial.  Compounding the issue today is the prevalent use of the term buyer persona to describe customer segmentation and buyer profiling efforts.  …

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State Of Buyer Personas 2016: Strong Correlation Between Effectiveness And Goals

In 2016, we will mark the fifteenth year since buyer personas were first introduced.  The journey, however, continues towards professionals and organizations gaining a true understanding of what buyer persona development entails. What is clear is buyer personas are now entering the mainstream of dialogue when it comes to overall customer understanding.  Incorporating Survey Data …

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What CMOs Need To Know About Listening To The Customer

It is a generally accepted notion that listening is vital to having positive and healthy interpersonal relationships. Listening is an essential skill for leaders in business, politics, sports, and in many different aspects of culture and society.  As a country, we have had many leaders rise to the occasion upon their ability to listen and …

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Intervention: Buyer Personas Are Not A Product Requirements Document

Product centricity is still kicking dust up in the perfect storm of changing buyer behaviors and transforming digital technologies. The dust up so thick, most organizations believe they may be responding to this perfect storm, yet, everything they do does scream products. A good case in point is what organizations believe they need to do …

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Stop Business Speak And Simplify Insights To Achieve Customer Centricity

Many executives today are struggling in two areas.  One is in formulating strategies designed to help their organization stand out in a crowded field.  The second is in creating an enterprise adept with deep customer insights and understanding, which translates into obsessed customer focus.  When struggling in these two areas, executives and their organizations can …

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State Of Buyer Personas 2015 (Survey Results)

It is now nearly fourteen years since the first-ever buyer persona development methodology was first created specifically for sales and marketing. For trivia and history buffs, Harcourt Education in 2002, a division of Reed Elsevier at the time, was the first organization to ever use research-based buyer personas for marketing and sales. How far we …

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Why Marketing Leaders Should Embrace Story Listening Before Story Telling

“What I’ve seen is a leader doesn’t start with storytelling, they start with story listening.” –John Maeda, Design Partner, KPCB During the past two years, B2C as well as B2B marketing leaders have heard much about the concept of storytelling in marketing. With the number one challenge facing marketers today being one of connecting with …

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Use Buyer Personas To Humanize Your Content Marketing

All businesses and people within businesses become enamored with, process, at some point. Process is good. Process can also be bad. Bad to the extent doing the process becomes more important than meeting the end goal. When it comes to content marketing today, it just may be too much process is actually preventing a human connection …

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The CMO Modern Marketing Guide To Buyer Personas And Buyer Insights Research (Part 1)

As the 21st century arrived, so did many new digital technologies.  Well over a decade into the new century, we now have a robust digital economy altering economics and business forever.  Enabling globalization on a scale unfathomable before the entrance of the 21st century.  One significant outcome has been the continued evolution of buying behaviors. …

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