Thursday, November 6, 2008

Occasional Series I - People

So the CMO has agreed that the Problem Statement neatly captures her thinking. She's asked you to come up with a concept proposal.

Reminder: Our bank, WSG, believes there's a group of potential profitable customers among a group we're calling "Builders". But they're very cynical towards banks, tend to churn, and things are tough on the home financial front.

Where do we go next? The methodology I recommend is POST, eloquently explained by Jeremiah Owyang and his colleagues at Forrester. The "P"stands for people.

"Huh? There must be stacks of data on these people" says the CMO.

Well, maybe ... but I'm prepared to bet that no-one's synthesized the 3 elements of demography, psychography, and technography. This is not a cake mix, so there's no set formula on how to do it. But the goal is to come up with between 5 and 10 personas - the number will depend on how you slice and dice the data. Your personas should be broad enough to allow most people to identify with at least one of them, and granular enough for your marketers to immediately start suggesting hooks.

Hint: demographics give you segments, psychographics point at clusters, and technographics suggest network nodes.

I also suggest that once you've developed the personas, you plan to get your executives out on the street on "safari" to identify these people and talk to them. I've seen this done this very successfully here in Tokyo, and it really works. Of course, make sure you do a couple of trial runs yourself!

In the next post in this occasional series, we'll start talking about laying out your objectives.

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