David Hamel wrote:

The issue behind it all is that the web isn’t static, it is constently changing.  Ever heard of AOL?  Of course you have.  Know anyone still using it? Probably not.  What about MySpace?  Also there is the inevitable the march of time.  Your persona for Bob has his age at 52.   In five years time, will Bob still be useful?  Probably the difference between 52 and 57 isn’t that large.  But what if your target demographic is 22?  There is a much larger difference between the interestes of a 22 year old and a 27 year old…In conclusion, use personas but don’t let them get stagnate, your personas represent people and people change.

Hamel rightly points out that personas come into being and are sometimes printed out on huge boards and laid out in the office. And then they’re taken down after the redesign and we forget about them. They don’t evolve. They don’t breathe.

I’d argue that the typical market segment, “male, 56-65, rural” is incredibly bland and not adequate at all. I think somewhere along the line, perhaps over the decades, we forgot why market segments are supposed to be powerful: like people talk and they are self-referential. This was demonstrated with the original Word of Mouth marketing studies focused on seed distribution. Word of mouth is critical. No company can possibly afford to pay for every conversion.

The segment should describe, instead, where rural older males are talking and how do you get them to refer you along. A person is so much more than just an age, gender, income bracket, number of kids and general DMA. Quantitative marketing science is capable of real contributions and advancement in that field.

If personas impart empathy in design, then segments should impart empathy in marketing.

And directly to Hamel’s point: they should be periodically revisited.

That might not sit well with the common “rip’em down and reinvent them from scratch” mentality that dominates the world – but I’m very comfortable with the notion of optimizing segments and personas over time as a program of ‘learning’.

I’d like to see more of that.

I hope to embark on some Internet Serious Business work that links community with government with some industry. There’s a large social analytics piece in all of this that I’m looking forward to.

The triple bottom line can be summed up as “profit, people, planet”. Basically, accounting for social and environmental impacts as well as the profit motive.

There’s a story about a young graduate student and an old econ prof walking down the street together. The young graduate student, clearly cash starved, spots a dollar on the street and says, “look, a dollar” and goes to reach for it. The prof holds him back, and replies “nonsense, if there really was a dollar there, somebody would have already picked it up by now.”

The point being: sometimes we assume, wrongly, that if an action was profitable and optimal, we would have already figured it out and the market would have already cleared. Again, as a marketing scientist that understands the problems of optimization – that assumption is totally false.

It’s probably very likely that you can’t maximize profit, social and environmental benefits simultaneously with existing technology. What’s required is research and development geared to bring those incentives into alignment. It’s perfectly possible to calculate social and environmental harm and introduce market mechanisms (thereby forming the basis of a tax credit system to guide the invisible hand towards more good). There’s a careful policy way out of this. And, as we’ve seen time and again in Canada (in particular): policy is powerful.

I have much of the profit stuff figured out. It’s the two other components, planet and people, that deserves some mental attention.