Knowing your buyer drinks chai lattes won't tell you why they buy financial advice.
Having buyer personas or customer avatars can be useful, but they can also mislead you into basing marketing decisions on superficial or irrelevant attributes that have little to do with why people buy the products or services you offer.
Buyer personas and customer avatars come up often in marketing conversations. People ask how to create them, how much detail to include, and how to use them in their marketing.
Over the last two decades as a marketer, I have seen buyer personas go in and out of fashion like barrel-leg jeans. When used well, they can enhance product development and give internal teams a shorthand way to talk about market segments. More often, though, they are hitched to the marketing communications level, leading to over-segmentation, marketing inefficiency, and so much complexity that the theoretical advantages are offset by the tactical workload involved in executing persona-based strategies.
When we rely on attributes that have little to do with the reasons people buy, our communications lack relevance, miss the moment, and fail to convey that we understand their reality.
How buyer personas or customer avatars can steer you off course
Knowing that your target market is a senior executive who likes yoga and chooses a whole-foods lifestyle may be useful if you are planning a luxury retreat experience in Noosa or Byron Bay. It is much less useful if you are selling accounting software or commercial insurance.
Parental status is a good example. I see this often in brands that frame advertising for everyday products around ‘busy mums’. If you are selling nappies, children’s parties or products tied to pregnancy and early parenting, it makes sense. If you are selling skincare, general professional services or homewares, parental status is unlikely to be a meaningful driver of the decision to buy.
When you build your messaging around it, you risk signalling to people who might otherwise be a good fit that you are not talking to them. For someone who has chosen not to have children, wants children but cannot have them, or has experienced pregnancy loss, that framing can create an immediate, unnecessary and often permanent disconnect.
That does not mean personas have no place. If they are built around attributes that genuinely influence a product decision, they can be useful. The issue is when they are built around arbitrary details that narrow your thinking and skew your messaging and targeting.
How to use buying context to improve your marketing impact
Buying context is always more useful than knowing whether your persona drinks a chai latte.
Instead of starting with a profile of the person, focus on the moment when something shifts in their life and creates internal or external friction, creating a possible need for what you do.
Here are some questions to help you define your buying context:
- What situations make your product or service relevant? For example, if you handle wills and estates, a divorce or separation creates a moment where your service becomes more relevant, often with urgency.
- What does the friction feel like in that moment? Is it stress, uncertainty, anger, grief, overwhelm or a desire for control?
- What are they trying to move towards or away from? They may not be able to articulate this themselves, so your marketing often needs to lead.
- What are the ways they could find comfort or relief for this moment of friction? For example, if someone wants to quench their thirst, they might sip water from a reusable bottle, buy juice from a vending machine, or make a cup of tea. Each option solves the same problem, but the choice is shaped by context, preference, environment, and past behaviour.
Building your marketing strategy on behavioural drivers is key
Unlike buyer personas or avatars, buying context focuses on the trigger point where action, or at least consideration, is more likely to occur.
In marketing science terms, these moments are often linked to category entry points – the situations, needs and triggers that make your brand easier to think of when people need what you offer.
Buying context sits at the marketing strategy level, influencing not just what you say and promote, but what you build, design or offer in the first place.
Once your buying context is clear, your marketing decisions become clearer, and your value will be easier to communicate. Your messaging reflects a situation someone recognises, helps them think through what to do next and be more curious about you.
Your priorities become easier to set because they are grounded in something observable.
How we can help you
If you’d like to shift your marketing strategy to the real drivers of choice, we can help. We’ll move you past your marketing maturity tipping point – where the marketing that got you this far needs to evolve for the future – by grounding your strategy in how and why people buy.
Contact us to learn more or book a free chat.
