Customer Persona for Your Brands
In the vibrant and competitive market of lifestyle brands, understanding your target audience is crucial. Lifestyle brands, in particular, thrive on the emotional connection they establish with their customers. A well-crafted customer persona can be the key to unlocking effective branding strategies and achieving business success. For Thai SME owners, this understanding becomes even more essential as they navigate the diverse and culturally rich market of Thailand. This guide will walk you through the process of creating an effective customer persona specifically tailored for lifestyle brands in Thailand, providing you with the tools to better understand and engage your audience.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. It includes detailed information about demographics, psychographics, behavior patterns, goals, and challenges. By creating a detailed customer persona, you can better understand and cater to the needs of your target audience. These personas go beyond basic demographic information, delving into the motivations, fears, and behaviors that drive customer decisions. For example, a customer persona for a fitness brand might include details about the customer's fitness goals, their preferred types of exercise, and the challenges they face in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Understanding these nuances allows you to create marketing messages and products that resonate on a deeper level with your customers.
Importance of Customer Personas for Lifestyle Brands
For lifestyle brands, customer personas are especially important. These brands often rely on a deep emotional connection with their audience, and understanding who your customers are can make a significant difference in how you communicate and engage with them. For instance, knowing your customer persona can help you tailor your branding and marketing strategies to resonate more deeply with your audience, leading to increased brand loyalty and sales. By having a clear picture of your ideal customer, you can create more personalized and relevant content, develop products that meet specific needs, and foster stronger relationships with your customers. Additionally, customer personas can help you identify new market opportunities, optimize your advertising spend, and improve customer satisfaction by addressing their pain points and preferences more effectively.
Steps to Create an Effective Customer Persona
Conduct Market Research
The first step in creating a customer persona is to gather data through market research. This can be done through surveys, interviews, and analytics. But we do not do focus groups. I will not go into details about the reason why we do not believe in focus groups but if you want to know about it, we are happy to explain when you contact us anyhow. Both qualitative and quantitative research are important to gain a comprehensive understanding of your audience. Qualitative research provides insights into the motivations, emotions, and true needs of your customers, while quantitative research offers statistical data that can highlight trends and patterns. For example, you might use surveys and analytics to gather data from a larger sample to capture the macro view, and then narrow down the customers to conduct in-depth interviews with a number of customers to understand their lifestyle choices and preferences. Sometimes, your team is a perfect match for the customer persona. To utilize such cases, it might be useful if you facilitate self-reflections for them. Utilizing various research methods ensures that your personas are grounded in real, and actionable insights that reflect the true nature of your market, rather than relying on your guess works. This customer centric mindset can be found in many innovative cultures like in Nintendo and Apple, where they put custom at the center of their assumptions.
Our agency had a particularly insightful experience with a fintech project for my previous startup. Competing with 33 existing financial institutions, 75% of which were backed by banks, required us to think differently due to our limited capital. We couldn't compete directly, so we needed to find new market segments that were overlooked by our competitors but still large enough to make the business viable. We conducted qualitative research by interviewing over 100 people, including various levels of investors and non-investors with different levels of interests in investment. This led us to identify a segment with unmet needs that our solution could address. Developing a detailed customer persona made it much clearer to understand the behavior and nature of this potential customer base. The persona guided us in recruiting the right people for refining our business aspects along the way, such as branding, marketing, and product development. For other similar projects, you can visit our past projects in the Works section of our website.
2. Segment Your Audience
Once you have gathered your data, the next step is to segment your audience. This involves identifying different customer segments within your target market. For example, a lifestyle brand in Thailand might have segments based on age, gender, location, and interests. By understanding the different segments, you can create personas that reflect the unique characteristics and needs of each group. Segmentation allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the most valuable and relevant customer groups, ensuring that your messages are more targeted and effective. For instance, you might identify a segment of young professionals in Bangkok who are interested in sustainable fashion, and another segment of older consumers in rural areas who value traditional craftsmanship. Each segment will have different needs and preferences that require tailored approaches.
3. Identify Key Characteristics
After segmenting your audience, it's time to identify the key characteristics of each segment. Along with those demographics such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographics like interests, values, and lifestyle choices, it's important to consider cultural and regional specifics relevant to Thailand, as these can greatly influence consumer behavior. For example, Thailand is surprisingly a small market due to too many layers of societal levels. They almost all speak different languages although they are all Thai, making it difficult to communicate in your own language with Thais who are from completely different backgrounds. I noticed this difficulty leads to the difficulty in marketing as well. Understanding the importance of family values in the culture and society of your segments can help you put the correct nuances into the messages that resonate with your audience on a deeper level. Additionally, regional differences such as urban vs. rural preferences, center Bangkok vs outer Bangkok, and local traditions can impact consumer choices and should be taken into account when developing your customer persona. Identifying these key characteristics helps you create more accurate and relatable customer persona that truly reflect the diversity of your market.
4. Create Detailed Persona Profiles
With your key characteristics in hand, you can now create detailed profiles of customer persona. A profile of customer persona should include a fake name, demographic details, psychographic information, behavior patterns, goals, and challenges. For example, you might start with a fake name but other information must be real from real people in the research, "Ben, a 39-year-old man who lives in a townhouse at Onnut, Bangkok who values health and wellness and enjoys outdoor activities with his son”. Each profile should tell a story about the life of the customer persona, including their daily routines, beliefs, preferences, goal, pain points, and gain points. By humanizing your personas, you can better empathize with your customers and create more meaningful interactions. Additionally, visual elements such as photos, infographics, and quotes can make your personas more engaging and easier to understand for your team. Two things to be careful to maintain privacy of the model of your customer persona: the portrait of the person has to be a fake portrait from a copyright-free stock photo, and remember to emphasize the importance of confidentiality throughout your team, especially the researcher and accountant (when handling invoices, etc.).
5. Utilize Your Customer Personas
Once you have your customer personas, it's important to use them over and over in your branding, marketing efforts, as well as in the product development. Customer personas can help tailor your messaging, product development, and customer service to better meet the needs of your target audience. It is also good to put it in the customer journey mapping to find out where they go and what they feel when using similar products. For instance, knowing that "Ben" values health and wellness and where he lives and commutes can inform the development of marketing campaigns that emphasize the health benefits of your products. So customer persona can also guide your content strategy, helping you create blog posts, social media updates, and advertisements that resonate with specific segments of your audience, we sometimes call this persona kind of context as buyer persona. It also guides you to refine your product by inviting them to be user testers. In the case of digital products, we sometimes call them user personas to specify the context. Additionally, customer personas can be used to train your sales and customer service teams, ensuring that they understand the needs and preferences of your customers, and nuances in their communication, providing more effective support.
For example, we worked with Vincita - a Thai outdoor apparel brand that has been in business for 37 years, selling products to 71 overseas markets including Singapore, the USA, Germany, and the UK. Our objective was to increase sales through their e-commerce website. We conducted both qualitative and quantitative research, including heatmaps, Google Analytics, and contextual inquiry with their real paying customers. By recruiting customers from various countries and coming up with a detailed buyer persona, we optimized the website to better align with these audiences. This resulted in a 46% increase in conversion rates within three months. Our personas allowed us to understand the specific needs and preferences of the right customers, making our website designing efforts more effective.
Case Study: Successful Use of Customer Personas
Let's consider another case study of a Thai lifestyle brand that successfully used customer personas. "Yoga with Air," a yoga and sound bath instructor turning into a yoga and sound bath studio business, developed detailed personas that highlighted the interests and values of their target audience. We found out by studying their customers that 60% of their customers were men and LGBTQ+, while other alternative studios have a much less portion of this demographic. This, of course, led to how we craft their customer persona. By tailoring their branding to these personas, they saw a significant increase in customer engagement. This example illustrates the practical benefits of using customer personas in branding strategy. For instance, by understanding that their target customers valued nature, Yoga with Air selected Patom Organic Living at Sukhumvit 49 branch as the venue partner where their brand values align to each other. They also created targeted social media campaigns based on their personas, creating a more harmonized social media entity. For more information about this project, you can visit our Works section of this website.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
When creating customer personas, there are some common pitfalls to watch out for. One mistake is relying too heavily on data rather than your own gut feeling. As the founder, owner or management of the company, sometimes you already have a better understanding of emotional values than the research. Although it's important to base your personas on actual research to ensure they are accurate and effective, it is not always the right answer. Another common mistake is creating too many personas, which can dilute your efforts. Focus on a one customer persona that represents the majority of your audience when you are a small business. Move up to 3 customer personas at the maximum if you are a major player in the industry. No more than 5 customer personas if you are a big corporation that represents Thai economics. No more than 7 customer personas if you are a global company that targets many different countries and regions. And no more than 9 customer personas if you are in the top 10 companies in the World. Don’t be afraid if your one customer persona could cover the majority of your target. It surprises you when you see how much it attracts other profiles than your defined persona. Lastly, remember to update your personas regularly as your market evolves. As your business grows, your understanding deepens and the market changes, your customer personas should be revisited and refined like a strategy to ensure they remain relevant. Avoiding these common mistakes can help you create more effective and actionable personas that drive your branding and marketing efforts.
Conclusion
In summary, developing detailed customer personas is a critical step for lifestyle brands looking to enhance their branding strategy and expand their reach. By understanding your audience, you can develop products that meet customer needs, create more effective marketing campaigns, and ultimately drive business success. Personas are not just theoretical exercises—they are practical tools that can guide your decisions and help you connect more deeply with your customers. Start developing your customer personas today and see the difference it can make for your brand. By investing time and effort into creating accurate and detailed personas, you can ensure that your brand remains relevant and competitive in the ever-changing market landscape.
If you need personalized assistance in developing your customer personas and brand strategy, contact our agency today. We're here to help you understand your audience and take your branding strategy to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your existing personas, our team of experts can provide the insights and guidance you need to succeed. Reach out to us to learn more about our services and how we can help you achieve your business goals.
Credit
Primary author: Taishi Hasegawa - CEO at WYLD.
Author assistant: Manusavee Sattha
Graphic by: Patsorn Arayaluck
