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[…]

The purpose of personas (or Personae in the sarcastic English) is to impart empathy in design. The purpose of market segments vary depending on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a marketing science analyst, they should tell you that the purpose of a market segment is to use variations in self-referential communities to adjust the marketing message (positioning)  so that it is more relevant to a particular audience, ultimately resulting in higher profits for the business. Put another way, a market segment should, ideally, impart empathy in quantitative marketing design. Personas are traditionally the product of qualitative insights. Market segments are traditionally the product of quantitative insights. Institutionally, neither side really wants to listen to each other. (In[…]

It’s summer event today at CM Toronto. It’s normally a very good day. As with anything, the 80/20 rule applies to it. We have a town hall, where a member of the executive comes and presents. It’s actually really good. When I started out as an analyst, the only time I was ever really fully brought up to speed (I felt) was during these presentations. Things have long since changed for Marketing Science folk. Then there’s some component of field trip or activity fun. Those are always fun. And then there’s an evening of more fun – typically featuring Captain Morgan. What I value most is getting to really talk to people from the other offices. So often, they’re voices[…]

You might recognize the chart below as the Technology Adoption Lifecycle – and it’s just great. The essential fact is that who you market to, over time, and how you market it, changes over time. I have many friends who are true “innovators” and I know a few people who are impostors. (They really don’t have a business problem to solve, but they would like to see a desired solution set be imposed on people, even if it doesn’t produce any value.) Innovators believe everything should be free, and rightfully so, since they’re working on improving the product. Many of my friends in this category behave more like actuarial industry insiders than anything else. There’s such a brutal rate of[…]

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[…]