Customer Persona Revealed in New Television Spot

Too often, organizations plan marketing programs without truly understanding their prospects and customers: who they are, how they think and what they seek.

Detailed customer profiles, or personas, force teams to truly appreciate audience needs. A typical persona might include a (fictional) name, demographic data, relevant lifestyle and personality characteristics, their relationships with the organization (if they have any) and their goals for a particular decision or purchase.

In a website redesign project, for example, personas help organizations understand common tasks that users need to perform. For an email campaign or direct mail program, personas might help identify a prospect’s content needs through their buying cycle.

Typical personas are representations of users (or user groups), so it’s important to base them on informed insights – and not pure fiction. However, the benefits of personas far outweigh the potential pitfalls.

Most personas drive strategies and tactics – and the actual persona information never leaves the walls of an organization. However, a new National Car Rental television spot clearly reveals the persona they want to target:

As the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog points out, National has a clear target audience and a benefit-driven proposition for that customer persona. For the rest of us, the message might not be compelling; in fact, I can identify with the “amateur” traveler that’s mocked in the spot. But for their targeted customer segment, National is out to prove that they understand their motivations and needs.