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What is a consumer persona? In marketing and sales, a consumer persona is a semi-fictional character based on the analysis and research of real customers. They represent the core traits of a key segment of your customer base. Personas help marketing design strategies to engage existing customers and attract new ones when done correctly. Jessica Couch, Fashion Business Essentials contributor, and fashion tech expert, discusses consumer personas and how they can impact your business.
Watch the full video to learn about:
- Building consumer personas based on your brand’s desired outcomes
- How to ensure your customer’s needs are met
- Conducting market research
How Do You Create a Consumer Persona?
Consumer personas — or archetypes — is a customer profile that helps you market to certain types of customers that you want to reach. Of course, customers will fall outside of the personas you create, but it represents the ideal person you are building your product for and catering to.
Traditionally, you have brands like Victoria’s Secret. Its consumer persona is the following: a female with 32 triple D breasts. She loves to go on yachts, parties all the time, and likes to shop. That’s a very arbitrary persona. If you develop customer profiles like that, you will suffer just like Victoria’s Secret did. Instead, the things you want to learn about your customers are the channels they use to shop apart from their body types.
Qualities You Have to Identify in Your Customer
There are important questions to ask about your customers:
- Is your customer mobile-first?
- Are they shopping in-store?
- Are they omnichannel shopping?
- Do they only come into the store once a week?
- Are their wives shopping for them?
- Are their girlfriends shopping for them?
- Do they only buy custom suits?
- Are they only buying for work?
In addition, recognize what’s motivating your customer. In other words, what gets them from browsing to making a purchase? More questions you should consider:
- Are they about style?
- Are they about fit?
- Are they about functionality?
You could go even deeper and ask, “Well, how do I get this information?” You can search databases that identify high-level demographics. The results may reveal the location and further statics. For example, you may get a result that says, “in New York, you have X amount of people that only buy custom suits.” That will help you scale down your available market share.
Go to the Source
What you have to do to build your personas is talk to your customer. You have to get out there and ask them directly. A way to do that is by reverse engineering. If you’ve identified your brand and the products that you want to sell properly, you should be able to place your competitors properly. Go to your competitor’s stores and websites, see what their customers are saying, and gather information.
You have to gather enough usable information if you have a brand, a design, or a marketing campaign. In addition to talking to customers, you should also be running surveys on social media, conducting in-person interviews, and looking at reviews and testimonials. Those key pieces of information will help you develop your archetypes and help you have a more hyper-focused brand.
If you would like to learn more about consumer personas and other facets of fashion marketing, check out the Fashion Business Essentials online course featuring Parsons and WWD. To explore marketing careers in fashion, download Yellowbrick’s Ultimate Fashion Career Guide.
