To persona, or not to persona. That is the question..
Have you ever inherited a customer persona deck, and wondered if anyone actually uses it?
It would seem you’re not alone.
This episode takes an honest look at customer personas. A marketing staple for decades, but one that’s increasingly dividing the room.
On one side, the people who see personas as foundational. But on the other side, those who argue they’ve become one of the laziest, and most unhelpful, tools in our kit.
Yes, both camps have a point. But who’s right
We start by steelmanning the case for personas. The genuine benefits they deliver when they’re built and used properly. Giving alignment across teams, a clearer vision and empathy for the customer, a shared language for briefing work, and a sanity check against our own biases and assumptions.
Then we flip the script. Because most personas, in most modern businesses, aren’t delivering. They’re built once and then frozen in time, gathering dust. They focus too heavily on who customers are, rather than how they decide. They flatter the assumptions of the people who built them. And they create a false sense of finished work, a totem the business points to as proof of customer-centricity.
This leads to the crux of the issue: Are we designing personas that help us genuinely understand our customers… or ones that simply describe them and stop there?
The answer, hopefully, is more useful than picking one side or the other. Because, to ensure we don’t use a LinkedIn click bait statement “Personas aren’t dead”. But they do need to evolve, from demographic portraits into behavioural profiles. Layered with the biases most likely to be in play, the emotional arc of the journey, and the context the customer is actually in when they’re making decisions.
MAKING THE CASE FOR BOTH SIDES
We explore:
🧠 Status quo bias. Why personas tend to stay frozen even when the customer has moved on.
🧠 Confirmation bias. How unresearched personas end up flattering the team that built them.
🧠 Peak-End Rule. Why mapping the emotional high and the final moment matters.
🧠 Loss Aversion. Why understanding what customers fear losing is often more powerful than understanding what they want to gain.
This episode also explores why context matters as much as demographics, why a behavioural lens makes personas genuinely actionable again, and three practical things you can do this week to audit the personas already sitting in your business.
🧠 A thought for you
Are you designing tools that help you understand people… or just describe them?
In this episode of The Customer Experience Lab , we look at rethinking the psychology of promotions.
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Customer Experience Thinking, is out on 21st May and you can get your copy now if you want to explore this further: Pre-order now.
