Personas Are For Everyone

By Ross Popoff-Walker - Researcher, Customer Experience, Forrester

Principal Analyst Moira Dorsey lead a break-out session today on the use of personas for marketing. She was joined by Glenn Drummond from Quarry Integrated, and Net Payne of Nortel, who worked together on a sales enablement tool for Nortel called "Coach." The tool is a set of web-based personas which allows sales people to quickly isolate key info about their target consumers to feed into their efforts.

At the most basic level a persona is a vivid description of a key target user, based on rigorous research of real people. What Nortel's Coach shows is that personas have a variety of applications outside their design-centric origins.  And there are other examples: Best Buy used personas to craft an in-store experience.  SAP usesd personas for the design of call center software.  What different ways have you found for utilizing personas?