ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the theory, application and development of a buyer persona. The buyer persona is also referred to as a marketing, user, customer or audience persona. The development of buyer personas guides decisions about product offering, value proposition, service, interaction and the customer’s journey towards purchase. Pain touchpoints were identified when the buyer persona was developed. Buyers legitimately worry that brands may misuse personal and financial information, or, indeed, that a website might be entirely fraudulent. A science fiction prototyping approach to buyer persona development is based on the idea that some services and products cannot be solely predicted by evaluation of past behaviours. The earlier example of a London-based florist uses two buyer personas: one focusing on consumers and one focusing on a business-to-business relationship. The example of Help Scout shows how a software company might use several buyer personas to target their marketing actions more effectively.
