One of my favorite scenes in Woodie Allen’s Annie Hall occurs when Allen’s character, Alvy, is listening to someone in line behind him at the movies expound on Marshall McLuhan’s work.  Alvy disagrees with the man and to settle the point, pulls McLuhan himself from behind a movie cardboard cut-out.  McLuhan informs the man that the man’s interpretation is wrong.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could always go right to the source?  Well, sometimes we forget that we can.

I have been in several meetings with marketers who have been debating the motivations, actions, desires, etc. of their customers, and I am continually suprised in how many situations conclusions are reached and judgements made without any actual data, information, or feedback from the customers themselves.

There isn’t any reason not to be talking to and getting feedback directly from our customers as there are a variety of  approaches that suit all different budget levels.  Online surveys, for example, are an inexpensive and easy way to gather insights that will help better understand the needs and motivations of your customers.  Sometimes, you find that your assumptions were correct and you feel more comfortable acting on them.  However, in other situations, you discover that you were wrong or you learn something completely new. 

You will be surprised at how many of your customers are willing to provide their opinion – all you have to do is ask.

Cyber Monday (Monday after Thanksgiving) gets all of the headlines as the most imporant online holiday of the season, but the reality is that in 2006, it was the 12th highest sales day during the holiday season.The following are the busiest online shopping days in 2006 according to ComScore:

If you have gone through a web redesign in the last couple of years, you are probably familiar with user personas.  Fortunately, most interactive agencies have integrated persona development into their standard design process.  In case you haven’t worked with user personas before, they are usually written descriptions of fictional characters who represent key target audiences.  Personas bring ‘users to life’ by communicating motivations, needs, objectives, and expectations that drive their online behavior.

Personas provide extremely useful insights and work like a compass to help guide your marketing efforts.   They need to part of your marketing planning for a number of reasons:

1. The process of developing personas should reinforce that neither you nor anyone in your company is your target consumer.  Even if you are a user of your organization’s product or service, working at your company, especially if you are a marketer, creates biases that make you different.
2. Creating personas help you think of your consumers in terms of needs, wants, and motivations, instead of gender, age, and household income.  Personas create a much richer picture of your consumer than any demographic could.  To me, knowing that someone looks at the purchase of a high-end boat as a status symbol is much more useful than knowing that the average household income of yacht purchasers is $10 million (I made-up number – all I know is that I am not part of that target audience).
3. Through persona development, you segment your target audience into groups that allow you customize your marketing and tailor your offerings in a way that you couldn’t if you focused only on the notion of a single, average user.  For example, Wal-Mart has identified a group of consumers who will probably never buy clothes from its stores but who are excellent targets for electronics.  Email campaigns that focus specifically on DVD players, plasma TVs, mp3 players, etc. are going to be much more effective in attracting that group than general, ‘Sunday Circular’ types of email blasts.

Know thy consumer is one of the commandments of marketing and personas are a great tool in helping you refining your understanding of key target consumers. If you haven’t created personas, you should.  If you have created personas, make sure that you are using your personas for all of your online marketing efforts, including email campaigns, banner advertising, and search marketing. 

The following are some resources on developing personas:

• Perfecting Your Personas
• Practical Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• An Introduction To Personas and How To Use Them