Andrea Scroccaro

Marika and Marie have the same age, the same status, the same interest also, and they come from the same city. In my database are in the same subgroup, so i can send  them a standard message, what is wrong in that? Let’s go deeper, both of them like the mountain yes, but how do they live the activities there? One like the mountain as she can meet her frends, walk there and satisfy so her need to be part of a group, the otehr like the mountain as let her feel alive trying week after week to improve her mountain competence.

Personas are archetypal representations of audience segments, or user types, which describe user characteristics that lead to different collections of needs and behaviors.

Alan Cooper

We have to change the point of view and change the way in which we comunicate and create the contents, for example if we have to organize a campaign, the step would not be anymore the following:

• Create an offer
• Schedule in the calendar
• Send to mass audience

We have to change the process and the target, because we have to start not anymore from the campaign, but from the customer:

• Build profile
• Desing an experience
• Interact individualy

Why do we need personas?

We need to create the profile to get closer to our customers, this is a way to align our perceptions to the reality because we cannot just think that we can create product and services without be in touch with them because we cannot be in their mind during the moments of truth to really  understand why they choose our brand and too often our perception is not the right way, maybe not totally wrong, but not optimized.

Working with personas could help the brands to focus on products and services with no energy wasting following some management idea with no relation with the reality.

Personas are fictional representations of segments of buyers based on real data reflecting their behaviors

How to create personas?

If buyer personas are representations of who buyers are, what they want to achive, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions based on researches, we have to find the way to collect that informations:

• Focus group
• questionnaire
• interview
• observations
• EEG test
• purchase data
• contests
• …

All this data could be organize in three big family:

Demographic

Demographic research has the goal to collect the informations about age, gender, status, location

Goals and challenges

Goals are the reasons why that drive the behaviour of the consumers, how they buy in which favourte channels, in which time, where happen their micromoments when they decide to buy a service or product

How we can help.

How we can help represent the list of activities that a brand can do to create a relation with the consumer to support him to reach his goal through the brand activities and engagements.

According to Philip Kotler, a niche market is a group with a clear segment definition. Usually it’s a small market whose needs are not being well served.
Complementing this definition, the niche market is one group reduced  with needs and/or specific wishes, willingness to meet them and economic capacity to make the purchase or acquisition.

By the way personas are not the goal, but is an intermediate step before the personalized communication, most companies infact don’t have the tools yet and their content isn’t nearly granular enough to work with Big Data and personalization, for that reason Personas have year of full life yet and is important to work on them.

The title is obviusly a provocation, the reason why i wrote that post is to point out how the shipping cost changes from the point of view of the online retailers and the point of view of the users too.

Milano 5 February 2011 My colleagues and me wait for the lunch pause to collect the different orders to make an online order and save money paying just one delivery.

Trento 5 February 2016 Im walking in a shopping mall and i see a nice pullover that reminds me that i have to buy a led lamp for the closet, so with my smartphone i open Amazon App and i buy the lamp that was in my wishlist since the previous day and i choose to receive the product in one working day for free as i joined Amazon Prime, and i was thinking why there is not the one hour shipping cost in my city.

In 5 years the consumers and the online retailers have changed their attitudes and propositions

The consumers in the past years have changed their attitude to live the web surfing with process there was already beginning that we can border in two sub seams: mobility and loneliness.

source: cisco.com

As we can see in the graphic the global mobile growth is not anymore just a trend, but it’s a fact that in the next four year more than duplicate. More the consumer become familiar with mobile devices, more they implode their real network and social activities even because they can now fill in a list of different actions from every place they are with any geographical need.

It means that the consumers can satisfy in mobility their needs splitting in micormoments:i want to know,  i want to go, i want to do and i want to know.

In 5 years the online retailers set the free shipping not like a perk, but like a necessity

The reasons is that as much as people like buying things cheaper online, they don’t like waiting to get them, especially if shipping costs significantly increase the final cost. So in the last years the delivery policy and the costs for a shipping decreased and opeed so the possibiltiy to offer free shipping even for smaller retailer.

So now is more easy to find different shipping solutions when we are in the cart to conclude the order, applying to some program like Amazon Prime i can have my order in 1 working day, that is a strong promise and USP, most of all if it come from the top player in the market.

In some city Amazon can deliver even in one hour the product that i buy. When and if the possibilities will be spread even in other cities, the online shipping paradigm will drastically change.

Do the consumer really ask for that?

According to a reasearch of Accent, the 88% of consumers would be more likely to shop online if they were promised free shipping. Consumers are also motivated to shop online by deals and promotions (30%) and the possibility that they might be able to avoid holiday crowds (20%). A survey of eMarketer.com suggested that customers are most motivated by percentage discounts while free or discounted shipping was the most effective customer incentive they could offer, 9 points below the response rate for percentage discounts. –

What can be the balance of that two incentives? An other research help us to understand whether consumers prefer free shipping instead of discounts and the results was very interesting because it shows how the activities should be adapted for the different target; in fact the preferences changes by demographic and age most of all.

The results revealed that respondents between the ages of 18 and 45 preferred percentage discounts to free shipping when making a digital purchase while the olders consumers preferred free shipping above discounts.What customers are willing to pay for is quality. In fact they declared to be open to paying more for a quality item, especially when the brand delivers positive customer service as well.