When you imagine yourself your potential customer, when you create Buyer Persona or design Lead Nurturing, customers you don’t want rarely cross your mind. People who won’t be your customers, to whom you don’t address your services, who you won’t satisfy – take them into consideration, because understanding who you don’t want is crucial to realistic and precise description of your target. In other words, getting to your target group requires recognizing who doesn’t belong there. We discuss it on example of creating negative Buyer Personas.
Definition of Buyer Persona
Buyer Persona is a representation or am image of your ideal customers. You create it by combining various data on customers (from analytics, customer service, social media, research, surveys…) and try to translate data and Digital Body Language into knowledge on their habits, needs, fears and inhibitions. Such deep picture allows to optimize communication significantly.
Read more on creating and use of Buyer Persona in our ebook.
Negative Personas: who are they?
If you try to determine addressee of your actions, face negative questions:
- For whom my products or services aren’t designed?
- Whose shopping habits would impede purchasing my product?
- For whom are my products too expensive/ too cheap?
- Who can’t understand them?
- For whom are they too complicated?
- How such person shops? Is s/he a researcher or an impulsive buyer?
- What triggers his/ her purchase?
- What prevents him/ her from buying?
You can create that picture just like you develop Buyer Persona. But why to do so?
1 To avoid unrealistic idealism
Many entrepreneurs fall into a trap of thinking that their product is for everyone. Image of huge group of recipients makes them feel safe and delivers promise of high profits. They aim high.
Recognizing that someone might hate our product or that we might not satisfy certain group is far from pleasant, as it forces you to face reality: limitations of our products, variety of actual customers, objectively existing problems and challenges.
2 To avoid wishful thinking and correct personas
You established an online boutique with hipster clothes for young, rebellious and independent women, and yet pensioners buy from you comfortable pumps which by accident are great outfit for Nordic walking?
Marketers tend to overlook their actual customers and live in the fantasy about their customers. They shape their communication for theoretical customers (because they identify with it or aspire to it) and neglect real clients.
The key here is to spot the problem and analyze once again deeply for whom your product is, and for whom not? What features are important? Maybe your rebels and old ladies share something? Maybe age doesn’t matter?
Looking from two different angles: positive and negative, will deliver more complex insight and help you separate important aspects from trivial ones.
3 To avoid illusory targeting
So you say that your customer lives in a big city, is 30 – 40 years old, cares about his/her health, appreciates quality and is willing to pay for it. It looks like a description, but is covers weight-lifter as well as yogi-vegetarian-mum. Will it help you choose optimal communication channels? Be careful with such illusory information, because they do much more harm than providing no value: they might overshadow real, important data.
Negative personas are great reality – check for all generalizations of that type. If you confront your vague persona with its negative, you will spot all the places when you lack precision.
4 Starting point
Sketching your non-customers, your negative Buyer Persona is a great starting point for creating Buyer Personas, because you begin with eliminating types of customers to whom you don’t address your product or service.
Therefore negative persona helps come to terms with the fact that not everyone will be interested in our offer and to acknowledge its limits. Its saves a lot of stress, frustration and disappointment in the future (e.g. by handling negative customer feedback).
Get to know your customers
Negative personas provide a solid reality – check for all efforts you undertake to picture yourself your customers. It’s also a great tool to use when you’re stuck in the process of communication strategy planning, designing Lead Nurturing, creating personas or any other task involving picturing your customer – allows to see the problem from another perspective and therefore inspires to action.
So if you want to know who your customer is, start from checking who s/he is not.
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