Creating Personas

Develop a targetable understanding of the ~$25B promo industry’s customers to identify clear opportunities for unlocking market share.

Project Info

Team: Custom Ink UX tiger team in partnership with Strategic Development and Marketing

Scope: Create personas representing users in the top industry verticals for promotional products
Business / Tech / Finance, Healthcare, and Education / K12

Goal

Our goal was to better understand the promotional product needs of customers in large organizations and the way that those needs drive how they discover, select, and maintain ongoing relationships with partners.

We Focused On:

Use cases
Discovery process approach
Competitive offering evaluation
Industry-specific requirements / constraints

Mixed Method Research Questions

What purpose does custom gear serve?
How do users approach the discovery process?
What essential characteristics do they look for in custom gear partners, and how do they evaluate competitive offerings?
What, if any, industry-specific requirements or constraints do they have?

Qualitative Methodology

12 hour-long customer interviews spread across the top industry verticals
16 hour-long non-customer interviews spread across the top industry verticals

Quantitative Methodology

1,942 customer survey responses spread across the top industry verticals
1,365 non-customer survey responses spread across the top industry verticals

Road to Personas

Themes were synthesized from tightly coupled nuggets.

Use Cases: Why do they order promo products?
Partner Attributes: What attributes and capabilities do they value most?
Discovery & Engagement: What vendor constraints must they abide by?
Design Collaboration: How do internal stakeholders decide on a design?
Approvals & Tracking: How do they keep in-flight orders on track?
Fulfillment & Storage: What do they think makes or breaks distribution and delivery?

Behavioral Pattern Mapping

Behavioral pattern variables were identified, against which users were mapped.

Getting from Behavioral Patterns to Personas

Personas were formed by looking at customers who clustered similarly across all behavioral pattern variables.

Quality of Experience across Milestones in the User Journey

Using a lookalike model, qualitative and quantitative data were matched with personas through participant nuggets and survey responses.

Nuggets: Nuggets were scored based on the quality, magnitude, and frequency of experience. The median scores of the nuggets were mapped onto the journey milestones identified in the themes.
Survey questions: Survey questions were matched to qualitative themes. The persona lookalikes' response values were averaged.

The ups and downs of our personas' experiences came into view via Quality of Experience scores, giving us a fuller picture of where opportunities lie.

Personas

Outcome

Personas have been used to help with strategy and roadmap planning. They have helped us to see where the big pain points are, where the opportunity is, and to better understand who we are designing for.

Next Steps

There is a lot of opportunity to use the information from the personas to inform future work.

Product or backend capabilities
Battle cards
Sales book prioritization
Landing pages
Product messaging