I have always found it difficult to be motivated to "design something for the consumer". It may be useful to think of market segments as conglomerations of anonymous people but when we set out to create a new "thing" we do need to have a better feeling of what they are about....who they are... what motivates them to seek out, handle, purchase, use and experience our offer.
For the last decade or so consumer oriented people I have worked with have described brand experiencers as people with personality- personas, no less.
Tom Peters quoted Philippe Starck at a design workshop I organised a few years ago!
“[At Thompson] I outlawed the word ‘consumer’ in all company meetings, and insisted it be replaced by the words ‘my friend,’ ‘my wife, ‘my daughter,’ ‘my mother,’ or ‘myself.’ It doesn’t sound the same at all, if you say: ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s shit, but the consumers will make do with it,’ or if you start over again and say, ‘It’s shit, but it doesn’t matter, my daughter will make do with it.’ All of a sudden, you can’t get away with it anymore. There is an enormous task to be done with this kind of symbolic repositioning.”
...which sums up why personas can be a powerful way of breaking conventional thinking. Philippe Starck's personas are even more powerful because you can go and ask them yourself... "do you like this new artefact we are thinking of creating?" It does not mean you will get guidance that is viable from a business point of view but you will get a valid point of view from a real consumer. So co-build a profile of a consumer to motivate your team's efforts at building a common vision but remember to find some real people too, that also fit the profile and ask them if you are on the right track.
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