Back in 1985, a software designer named Alan Cooper was working on creating a project management application. He stopped. He had the skills to complete it himself, but there was something missing: he couldn’t picture the type of people who would actually buy it. As a result, Cooper asked around. He interviewed coworkers who seemed like they’d match the type of customer who would use his software. One of those coworkers was a woman named Kathy.
Cooper used those interviews to build a fictitious composite: a persona with specific goals and specific frustrations and a specific way of looking at her job. Every bit of it was rooted in real people, but Kathy herself was not real.
But that persona document changed how Cooper built software. It also became the foundation of a tool that most marketers now misuse completely.
The Fake Persona Problem
Episode 5 explained how to define your target customer: the segment, the problem, the one-sentence description. A buyer persona adds flesh to those bones. It’s not who your customer is on average, but rather the one specific type of customer, described in granular detail based on qualitative interviews.
Notice I said “ qualitative interviews ” there. Let me repeat that: buyer personas should come from real conversations.
Instead of talking to real customers, most personas are invented by marketing teams. That means the “Customer Service Representative Chris” or “Startup Founder Claire” your team designed is purely fictional. So when you look at their persona document, you’re not looking at real buyers. You’re looking at sales’ imagination of what your buyers sound like. The problem with imaginary buyers is illustrated by Alan Cooper’s Kathy.
What your Persona should Look Like
Fake personas are made up of demographics: age, income level, job title, where they live. Demographics can help you understand who your customer is, but they’ll say nothing about why they buy what you do.
Personas built from real interviews include the language your customers use to describe their problems. Not the language you think they would. The language they actually said during the interview. If you’re selling productivity software and one of your customers says “I lose two hours every morning just trying to decide what I should work on first,” you just found your value proposition. That quote should be in your ads. Put it in your email subject lines. Banner it on your landing page. You know people respond to marketing that uses their own words? That’s because their words reflect their own pain. You’ll never identify that pain if you’re just looking at demographics and job titles.
In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Cooper wrote: “Real users are not elastic.” He meant that designing to an imaginary person who adjusts to whatever problems you think they have is a fool’s errand. The same applies to marketing.
Creating your Own Persona
Pick five people to interview. Five people who match the basic demographics of your ideal customer. Now talk to them about their lives. Learn about what a bad week looks like for them. What solutions they’ve tried in the past and what made those solutions fall short. When they describe their problems, listen for emotional language. Listen for fear. Listen for moments of extreme frustration. Don’t sell to them, interview them. Find out what they call the problems you want to solve.
After interviewing five people, you’ll start to notice trends. Certain words and phrases pop up again and again. When you find that common language, you have your persona. It won’t be a fictional person. It’ll be a composite of five real, actual buyers.
Use your customer’s words, not yours. Call out the core problem they face by name. Identify the moment of the week the problem is the most frustrating for them. That’s the time your marketing needs to find them.
Personas like this aren’t just bullet points for a slide in a presentation. They’re documents you refer back to whenever you’re writing marketing copy, designing ads, or planning outreach.
Alan Cooper used interviews to build Kathy way back in 1985. Kathy helped him produce an entire product. It’s time you built yours. Interview five people this week, and next week we’ll regroup on what you should do next.
