Before this course, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what a persona was. I learned that this is a marketing strategy used to gain consumer insight and take a step in their shoes. We produced a fictitious character to represent a consumer of Target’s demographic and developed a few ways to increase their shopping at the store. The persona we created is first-generation American named Natasha Rajan. She’s a pre-med college Senior at UT that struggles between following her parent’s expectations and forging a new path for herself. Boom. That’s a persona right? Wrong! There are many more emotions, interests, and intimate details that go into creating a persona. We created a mock Twitter, Instagram, and blog to get a better feel and understanding of the character we created. I was initially surprised at how in-depth the professor was asking us to be when describing our persona, but I learned that it is necessary in order to form a deeper connection with them. The more detail and imagery you can associate with your persona, the more authentic this person seems. By the end of the project, we knew everything there was to know about Natasha: where she shops, what she wears, what she thinks, how she was raised, what her everyday life was like. She wasn’t just a character we came up with – she was real. Especially after talking to other people that are similar to Natasha, it really helped make her come to life and empathize with her.
Generative Research
Another skill I’ve mastered throughout this semester is doing generative research to obtain an in-depth understanding of the consumer. The combination of concentric circles, digital ecosystem, and typical weekday timeline gives us the ability to potentially discover any vulnerabilities or key insights. Doing a simple interview or survey with the consumer isn’t enough to tap into all the important areas of their life. Asking them to prioritize stores and items that are most important to them really illustrate their loyalties and show significance. At first, the topics may seem irrelevant to the big picture, but it’s important to know about all aspects of their life and see how you can tie it into the research objective. When doing generative research on our participants, I was able to get to know them better and see which portions of the life connect to our persona’s. It was cool to see how similar Natasha’s life was to some of our participants. Although we made some generalizations about the persona, a lot of it was proven through the subjects we found.
Working on this project was definitely an eye-opening experience. The instructions were very vague, which gave a lot of room to either fail or succeed. We’re all students that take 3-4 other classes and I think sometimes the workload and amount of time given to complete the phase was unreasonable. As for my team members, I was extremely lucky and ended up with a group of intelligent individuals. Honestly, I’ve learned so much from them (and other classmates) than I have in my entire college career. I’m not a very creative person, but their flow of ideas inspired me to think big. I’ve definitely gained a lot more creative confidence from working on this project and it’s been an influential part of my academic career.
