Let's talk about personas. But before we do, I want to clue you in to a truth about integrated marketing. The truth is integrated marketing is easy to say. But it's hard to do. Why is it hard? It's hard because it requires focus, discipline, and stamina.

Too many marketing campaigns have failed because of the loss of stamina, focus, direction, too many times, politics gets in the way of executing a really good marketing strategy. And decisions become made by who yells the loudest, as opposed to well rounded facts and hypothesis based in customer data. So for that, to stay on track, we need a persona. But where did this notion of a persona come from, and why is it so important? Sometimes it's helpful to look backwards at our history, to see where we were from a marketing standpoint, in order to understand how marketing works today, and where we need to go in the future. So if I were to ask you to define for me, what is marketing?

Many of you would probably list out the commonplace activities that come up. webcast marketing is webcasts, newsletters, sales, podcasts, coupons, etc, etc. And you'd be right. Marketing is the sum of activities coupled together to help sell and promote a product. No problem. But if that's marketing, here's the next question.

What is integrated marketing? integrated marketing is the thoughtful combination and connection of relevant marketing messages and tactics that are used to tell a story and engage the audience. It's the equivalent of parts one In close formation versus an actual airplane. So let me ask you which which of these would you rather ride. And the same is true when it comes from marketing, and why integrated marketing is so hard. So let me see if I can pull some of these pieces together.

Now, I'm 56 years old. I don't look old, but I do remember the pre internet days. And in 1990, I remember reading an article on the washington post that was called ads. They're everywhere. And that intrigued me and in reading it, the premise of this article was that the average person in 1990 this was a good five or six years before the real concept of the internet had any kind of meaning in a marketplace perspective. So the Washington Post hypothesize that the average person you and I wouldn't be hit by more than 3000 messages every day and I thought, well, that's a pretty bold claim that can't possibly be true.

And so I decided to do my own little mini experiment. And on the work one day, I had a 20 minute commute to get from my home to the office, I decided to count the number of ads I would encounter along the way. Now the ads would be anything from billboards to bumper stickers to signs to logos, anything that would present a message to me that says, hey, I'm here, pay attention. And in the 20 minutes that it takes me to get to work. I lost count after 200. So now the concept of 3000 messages every day, and that didn't even include television.

And remember, email was in its infancy. There were there was not a lot of that going on back then. But 3000 became a reasonable number. In fact, I also remember Later that year, I was vacationing up at Lake Tahoe and went up to ski at the top of One of the hills and I noticed that after I got off the ski lift, what I was meant with was a billboard for Marlboro cigarettes. And like, gosh, I came all this way out here to get away from civilization. And here's this billboard standing in the in my face.

So 30,000 messages every day, and here's the punchline. 99% of them were irrelevant. So now let's fast forward to today. How many messages Do you think the average person is hit with every day? And in a number of articles that I've found over the years that the number has surpassed 10,000 and that assumes you have a good spam filter. So what does this mean for the given marketer?

How do we combat all this noise in the marketplace? What this means is that every single marketing activity or strategies need to be so focused, so relevant to our target buyers or target personas that they can cut through the noise of the clutter to be relevant. be heard. And that, my friends is why integrated marketing is so hard, because there's such a temptation to try to be all things to all people to cast your net as wide as possible because of the fear of missing a sale of missing an opportunity. And so that fear of missing overcomes the need to focus. Oftentimes, I hear this lament, Mike, I know half of my marketing investment is wasted, but I don't know which half Well, here's the deal, I can actually tell you which half is wasted.

All I have to do is look at your strategy and see if you have a well crafted persona. Most of the time companies don't. And when you don't, it's easy to see where the messages go off track where the offers are wrong. And where you've just added to the confusion in the marketplace. We need a tool to combat that. And that's where the PR persona fits in.

Bear with me for a minute. And let me share how this is relevant for today. So we go back to World War two American men went off to war by the thousands by the hundreds of thousands and women took up the jobs in the factory. They helped keep our nation's running. And even so because of the dramatic war effort, we've got now women working in the marketplace. There's a lot of focus on what needs to be done and rationing now becomes commonplace.

We needed to ration many of our carefully identified resources, and we need to cut back and so dreams of family life were put on hold as we navigated through this war process. The war ends in 1945. And all these fighting men and women come home and they want to resume their interrupted lives. They have different dreams that they put out. Hold, to look for the greater country's needs. And now when they return, they said, hey, it's my turn, I'm going to get married.

I want to have a family. I want to have the life that I want to have, because I've given to my country. And now it's time for me to get back. And Americans wanted it all. Out of this, a new hero emerged in American society. And that hero was that of the manufacturer.

The goal was to develop more goods in less time. And these heroes were no nonsense. Roll up your sleeves to people. Here's an example take Henry Ford, and Henry Ford would mass produce automobiles, and the saying at the time was you can have any color you want, as long as it's black. And the reason so was having to do with the assembly line and to mass produce as many of these autos as possible. We couldn't, they couldn't take into account variations of various things.

Aisles or options, everything was uniform, and the color was uniform so you could have any color you wanted, as long as it was black. This then led to the notion of mass marketing. This is where mass marketing came from. And it followed the lines of distribution, which were not surprisingly the same lines used for the military for the war effort. There was a wholesaler selling to a reseller, and ultimately to consumer and these lines of distribution with supply depots for the supply chain was mirroring exactly what we had already set up for the previous five years during the war. Coupled with this, we're advertising blitzes that aim to showcase all the new merchandise available to all So remember, we have this very hungry population of men, women and new families who wanted it all they want to their dreams were deferred no longer and they wanted to have all the best ideas Items that they had put off.

And so they eagerly lined up to purchase these. And they were mass produced and distributed in a uniform way across the country. So let's fast forward again to the 1960s. So now it's 10 years later. And marketing starts to take a little bit of a whole, there's a little bit of a sense that maybe the market isn't quite a uniform market, maybe there are some differences that people want. And this is where the the concept of in marketing was known as the four P's came about thinking about product, price, place and promotion.

And there's a formula for adapting these principles in order to bring your product to market to sell the most to be the most successful in the market. And because we're still following the roots of mass marketing, the notion of caveat emptor which is Latin for let the buyer Be aware, put the obligation on the buyer to make sure that they were buying what they thought that they were buying, the responsibility was on the buyer not on the manufacturer, manufacturer just wanted to sell as many goods in uniform fashion as possible. And it was up to the buyer to make sure that they were purchasing the right thing. Now, it wasn't all that difficult because the choices were somewhat limited. Nevertheless, there was a little bit of, shall I say, contempt towards the buyer, because we were treated all as a uniform entity. Let's bring forward another 1020 years.

And we've got other elements of history, that now we're impacting the profile of the American buyer. So we had all things from Vietnam, and people speaking out against the war effort. We had new styles in fashion for women. We had the evolution of punk rock and new types of music further differentiating and segmenting what was perhaps originally thought As a homogeneous customer base, we had new technology come into place, and fashion in the 80s continued to be very individualistic. There was lots of variation now coming on to the market. And so Ted Levitt, in his book marketing myopia, had this famous quote, there is no such thing as a growth industry, only consumer needs, which may shift at any time.

And I would add, and they often do, this became the mantra or the preamble to a new generation of thinking about marketing. So now we come into the 1990s. And we've shifted even further because whereas the marketing landscape started to recognize that there were people who maybe were not homogeneous, but new realities continued to take shape, and there was a new age of what was called the empowered buyer. people choosing what messages they listen to, and people talking back. And remember, this is long before social media, but word of mouth, other venues via radio or talk shows, other types of forums are starting to come for where people could actually express an opinion back to the manufacturer. Oh my god.

This is a brand new concept now taking for roots. The family unit has been defined, dad is no longer the only breadwinner. You can see we're starting to break down some of the stereotypes of what a typical buyer would be. And people would now start to define themselves with groups. And now this led to this notion of niche marketing. niche marketing is about marketing just subsets of people who behave similarly.

And so the notion of caveat emptor was thrown out a new notion, caveat and tourim aware of the buyer now took four now this is huge because the powers is shifting from the manufacturer to the consumer. And those manufacturers who did not treat the consumer with respect, soon found themselves losing money and in many cases, eventually out of business. This leads to today, where and it's cliche to say that the internet has changed everything. People are individuals who make their own choices. And the advent of social media meant that you could engage people in a one on one perspective. Today, it's all about one on one marketing.

It's about the personalization, and the advent of big data and the analytics, the analytics that go with it. And all the tools that are being talked about today. And advisory boards, across industries are all about the power of the individual and personalization, which has dramatically changed the way that we've gone to market and it didn't just happen, it happened because of the steps that I've walked you through In this brief history lesson. So in summary, we've made From mass marketing, to niche marketing now to one on one marketing, and here's the kicker is it's all about one thing, it's about the customer, not the product, those manufacturers who can think in terms of honoring and respecting the consumer, as a consumer of one who have individual needs and wants to be catered to those manufacturers who understand that embrace that level of personalized personalizations are the ones that are going to succeed into the future.

So what does this mean from a persona perspective? Well, now As you've seen, it's not a mass market. We're now on one on one. But now for marketing, it's a little daunting to say, Gee, I have to market to a market of one that would cripple anybody. So this notion of personas about aligning or grouping people of reasonable background expectations, experiences problems they're trying to solve is that how helpful tool for guidance. So I mentioned earlier that some executives would say half of my marketing investment is wasted.

But I don't know which half actually I can tell you, if you've got a persona that's well crafted and targeted, where you understand what the buyer is trying to do, and you have empathy for where the buyer is and where they're going, you are more likely to have a successful marketing campaign, and your successful art marketing outcome of the investment that you make. If you don't have it. If you try to be all things to all people, if you're sloppy, if you're lazy, you're going to miss it and that marketing investment is going to be wasted, you'll go to the wrong venues, you'll have the wrong messaging, you'll have the wrong offer. We can no longer afford that today. The key to the persona is having empathy for the people we're trying to sell to. And the persona is a is a tool that will enable that.

So this is all by way of background to introduce you to the concept of the persona. Are you Use a template that is a tool for engaging in discussion within the company to try to understand who these target people are, what type of companies do they work for? What's the profile of the ideal company? Who would buy your product? And then ultimately, the psychographics? How and why do they think that the way that they do, these are three dimensions of the target persona we need we as marketers need to understand to be successful.

And that's why I've designed this course, to allow us to play with this tool to challenge our assumptions, and to align and guide our organization to be successful in the marketing programs that it executes. And with that, within this course, I have 10 steps that will guide you and your team through success and will give you the recipe for doing all of these. hope you'll join me in my class on personas and how to do Donal develop your best persona possible