On the UX-front, I’m a disciple of Cooper’s work too, although I’ve never had the opportunity on a project to be solely a UX guy. I have, however, been fortunate to be able to champion the importance of personas, personal goals, and incorporating user-centric interface design into several projects.

Thanks for calling out mental models, I think that is the crux of it, and your comment will help people catch that, where I probably didn’t stress it enough. The other interesting dynamic is that not-yet-customers will probably have a mental model that is different than the mental model formed by a typical current customer / user.

Our current customers are already building models on top of a world-view that incorporates our products. It is natural for our current customers / users to build on the implicit model of our software for “what would be better?” analysis. This leads to incremental improvements, usually. Or it at least encourages inside-the-box thinking.

Our not-yet-customers are either unaware of our products, or have reviewed and discounted them. Tapping into that view of the world is a great way to grow the effectiveness – and by extension, the market successes – of our products.

Thanks again for the kind words, and welcome aboard!

I want to say thanks for a very neat article. There has been much discussion in this arena of late and your post helps to clarify the distinction that should be made between user and buyer personas. My partner, Angela Quail, and I are former Cooperistas as we like to say and lived in the realm of user personas. For the past six years we’ve dealt with B2B complexity and expanding upon the notion that buyer personas for B2B can be very different than user personas. What is important, is the “bleeding” into each persona area as you note whereby sometimes the user and buyer persona can be one in the same role. The emphasis then becomes on a detailed depiction of the many interactions that are taking place to evaluate and reach a decision. Knowing the user’s and buyer’s goals is critical for it targets not only the product development effort but the marketing and sales efforts. You eloquently make this distinction. I like that you note the importance of mental models because most people miss this element of persona development and have a difficult time picking up how to recognize and characterize mental models. There is much room for growth in this area whereas some of the fundamentals applied to user personas need to be expanded upon for buyer personas to make them valuable. All in all Scott, a great post!

Tony Zambito

I like the tricycle example too – easy for anyone to understand. Much easier than Eunice and Brenda :).

For KIDS tricycles the buyer and user are different. However for those ADULT tricycles that you see at retirement communities, the buyer and user are the same.

David

Awesome analysis. You, Adele and the others commenting here are more experienced than me on the subtleties of buyer personas vs. user personas.

I’m an outbound marketing guy so I focus nearly all of my efforts (writing, speaking, blogging) on buyer personas. While I was responsible for product management when I was Asia Marketing Director for Knight-Ridder ages ago (I left that job in 1995), I’ve focused my career on the topics I write about in “The New Rules of Marketing” — specifically related to buyer personas.

Note that much of the product development parts of our new book “Tuned In” came from Craig Stull, the founder and CEO of Pragmatic Marketing.

I’m a simple guy. And I like simple examples. On the speaking circuit, when this sort of question comes up I talk about tricycles. The buyer personas are Moms, Dads, and Grandparents. The user personas are toddlers.

Take care, David

Your dev team is doing exactly the right thing, and I love that Kadient’s culture promotes persona use with the pictures and cut-outs. Must be a blast to work there.

I’m in the middle of Tuned In right now and loving it.

Very compelling post, great points on user versus buyer. At Kadient we are focused on the entire sales organization so a sales person is a user and buyer, VP of Sales is the Buyer and Knowledge Manager is the User.

We use these personas not only in our sales and marketing activities but in development as well. When our development team is working on a launch or product feature there is a lot of discussion around “what would Anya do”, “What would Luke want?”.

David Meerman Scott’s most recent book “Tuned In” discusses just that http://www.amazon.ca/Tuned-Extraordinary-Opportunities-Business-Breakthroughs/dp/047026036X/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt/701-6433517-4713931. Focus on your buyers and users to ensure what you are building will fill a need or solve a problem.

Keeping our buyers and users in mind (and as pictures in our kitchen and cardboard cut-outs in our conference rooms!) keeps us focused on them and their needs at all times.

After thinking about it some more, I can only hope that the characters in the CRM advertisement were intended to be entertaining and tongue-in-cheek. Maybe they didn’t represent buyer personas or user personas, but were just intended to be engaging caricatures of people in those roles.

That at least would just represent poor execution. The messages that were delivered did not seem to be compellingly targeted at a buyer persona’s goals, nor did they express the value of the user persona problems that the product is intended to solve. Also, if the actors were instructed to be self-mocking, they did it with such a dry and understated sense of humor that I missed the joke. Maybe if Jane had said “imaginary aribitrary future spend” instead of “fictional spend”, then it would have attracted some buzz as a witty commentary buried in an ad.

Thanks again!

For B2B products (or any complex sale involving multiple buyers), I find it helpful to build buyer personas for each of the people who will influence the buying decision — for example, there is typically an economic buyer, a technology buyer, and, frequently but not always, a user buyer who will be included in a committee of buyers. We would describe the factors that influence the buying decision as “buying criteria” and capture these insights (and communicate them internally) in buyer persona documents — one for each of these roles. It is easy to see that economic buyers have far different buying criteria than user buyers or technology buyers. If one of these personas is also a user, their “using criteria” would generally be captured in a separate document, if only to facilitate internal communications and prevent confusion for the internal users of those documents.

I think that the Microsoft campaign that I reviewed in my post http://www.buyerpersona.com/2008/07/personas-tell-t.html) intended to treat Lisa as both a buyer and a user of their CRM solution. They’re probably right about her roles, but they should never have tried to explain either her buying or using criteria in an external campaign. Plus it is completely unclear why they decided to make her out to be such an idiot.

I updated my “Product Managers: Chief *Holes or Value Creators?” posting to link to this article, since I didn’t do justice to describing the differences.

Thanks for taking the time to clarify the topic.

- Shaun Connolly