Up Front and Personal: Use Personas to Get Closer to Your Audience

If I asked you to write a brochure for Fortune 500 CEOs, you'd probably keep it at a high-level (one of those terms I despise, but use anyway) and you'd likely use words like competitive advantage, bottom-line business performance, innovation and globalization. All issues that your CEO audience faces everyday.

But let's tweak the assignment a bit. Write the brochure for Jeffrey Immelt. (If you don't know who he is, get out now).

Your bullshit barometer may come down a bit. You won't be quite so patronizing in your language. You'll read your standard CEO-type phrases and realize how pedantic they've become. Why?

Because when you picture someone like Jeff Immelt reading "Today's corporation needs to build innovation into its everyday culture to stay competitive in an increasingly global economy," you might even groan, because you know that's what he would do. After all, you haven't told him anything he doesn't already know (the number one failure of most marketing communications). You've haven't educated him. You haven't even said anything profound. So why should he continue reading?

Our colleagues in User Interface Design create User Personas to avoid this scenario. They already know users want computer-based applications that are intuitive and friendly. They know users prefer simplicity over complexity. Good GUI designers don't waste time on creative briefs that deliver historical analyses of what they already know. They conduct fresh "user research" to intimately understand what their audiences expect, but more importantly, how they behave and how they've changed.

Sometimes the person is real (based on some laboratory style observations) or fictitious. But even if they are imagined, the interface is designed around the known personality and behavior traits of an individual, not a bulleted lists of responsibilities  and tasks.

Dave Clark, a user interface designer for TandemSeven explains it this way: 

"Applications and portals that are based on user attributes alone often become overwhelmed with too  many features as baffled designers and developers cram in more capabilities and complexity. Personas bring the focus back to real people -- with a fresh view that can be a source of innovation. User research typically uncovers insights into unarticulated, unimagined new services and capabilities."

If you write for executives, try to get above the usual cliches. Do some digging and read about executive attributes that are personal and real. For example, read what Executive Coach Rich Gee said about senior executives in our recent interview:

"As individuals advance to executive levels, development feedback becomes increasingly important, more infrequent, and more unreliable."

Or what Eliza Collins, a frequent writer about executive success, has to say in her book Making it in Management:

"Successful executives have the capacity to tolerate ambiguity as well as possess the fortitude to be tough when necessary and to not give in to others' ideas of what is right."

These two observations of people who work with executives everyday show us that it is "lonely at the top" -- not in a cliche sort of way, but with some insight that is based upon their personal experience with executive interaction, not just something they've read or heard.

If you do some deeper homework about your audience using practices our colleagues in GUI development employ, you'll see your communications become more relevant, and more insightful.

Rather than write a brochure for a mass CEO audience, try speaking personally to just one of its participants. Think of an executive you know personally or read one of the many Jeffrey Immelt interviews. Then write him a letter. You'll be surprised at your more
conversational, more personal style. 

You might actually knock your copy up a notch or two with something like, "Several leading executives recently shared the techniques they use to burn their visions into the minds and spirits of their boards of directors. And you know what? They don't use board meetings. They don't depend on golf. And not one of them has ever engaged PowerPoint."

That might inspire a CEO to keep reading more than recounting something he or she already knows. By doing some audience homework, you'll become a source of insight, not a history lesson.