What drives Clint Westwood? What is it that makes this man wake up at quarter to 7 five days a week, pull on a pair of Ariat Ramblers and tilt the brim of a black Stetson Durango hat, look himself square in the bathroom vanity and ask, “You feeling lucky, punk?”
Where does he take off to every morning, carving up the highway from the cockpit of a ’72 Gran Torino, chasing the horizon into West Los Angeles and Studio City -- not stopping for radar, damsels be darned. This is a man who pulls into the open lot of the O.K. Corral, flashes his teeth at studio security and then stomps out the balance of a spent Marlboro, his belt line heavy with Texas leather and carbine lead. His trailer is an ’82 Airstream Caravel with nothing inside but a red oak Eames lounge and a cabinet full of Kentucky bourbon.
This is a man who knows what he wants and knows how to get it. At the end of a long shoot, running down outlaws of a cattle heist, when the five o’clock shadows play across the landscape of camera and crew the same way they creep in from the corners of his chin, when he feels that midday scratch and scruff, Clint Westwood only trusts the smooth, quick-foam coverage of Dr. Dan’s Original Shaving Cream.
Of course, if any of this were real and Clint Westwood was more than just a figment of some drummed-up marketing ploy, I’d have myself a pretty decent target for the demographic angle of my new Dr. Dan’s Original Shaving Cream -- which I also just made up on the fly. Point is, this exercise in creating buyer personas is key in understanding where to direct your brand messaging and how to concept your image.
Depending on the number of products you’re trying to sell, you could create multiple buyer personas, sometimes up to 10 or 15. But if you’re just starting out, I’d keep it simple and go with one or two. Here, I’ll show you some quick and easy ways to get started so you can dream up your ideal customer and hone in on the demo you were destined to sell.
Press The Flesh
One of the best ways to get the inside scoop on emotional appeal is to go straight to the public and ask the tough questions. Creating buyer personas based on the opinions, preferences and personalities of real-world consumers is a great way to generate an accurate image of just who you’re looking to cater to.
What’s better is that you can find a decent sample of interviewees in the pools of your existing customers and prospects, or by simply recruiting volunteers from the internet on sites like Craigslist. Just come at your interviewees with honest intentions and perhaps a little incentive. You’ll find many people love being probed for their opinions and analysis.
Picking Brains
Once you find the right interviewees, you should come at them armed with an arsenal of hard-hitting questions designed to really get at the root of their motives. In coming up with your questions, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a buyer persona interview, not a focus group or feedback session on your brand. You want to know who these people are, where they work, what their roles are, what they do for fun, how much money they make, etc.
Once you establish a comprehensive character analysis, you can then round out the data by asking about shopping habits, recent purchase history, brand loyalty and all the things you’re hoping to affirm in their particular persona.
Put Your Personas To Work
Having compiled the strengths, weaknesses, desires, traits, quirks and character of your new buyer persona, you should then be able to put it all together to create a working model for prospective clientele. There are many methods and applications for mapping out your buyer personas. There are spreadsheets, outlines, databases, Cartesian graphing systems -- whatever metrics and parameters you dream up, you can pretty much apply to create a fake personality with inclinations on your product and a pocket full of Monopoly money to spend.
What you don’t want to do is leave this poor fictitious soul doomed to wander the cold, callous landscape of the data matrices without bringing them to life in the real world. To fully understand these personas, you must take them out in the open, give them a name and spend the better part of an afternoon talking to yourself like a crazy person. Train your copywriter on the nuances of your character’s voice. Have your sales staff pitch the long and short of your product line to a cardboard cutout of what you think they might look like. Sure, this sounds like some psychotic exercise in pseudo-schizophrenia, but it works.
Now that you have a solid understanding of where to find interview candidates, what questions to ask and what to do with their answers, go out and Frankenstein a demographically sound buyer persona. Hold out your hand, and take their two cents on your brand. In the famous words of Clint Westwood, “There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who sell and those who aren’t really even people at all but are constructs of some grand marketing tactic to get accurate insights on modern buyer behavior.” Something like that.
