Every day, new experts, start-ups, organizations and other enthusiasts come up with the most amazing solutions, breakthroughs and improvements in the field of blockchain technology. From security to speed, from scalability to sustainability and practical business models. The technology is receiving more and more enthusiasm from all corners of the world. But blockchain also has a long way to go in terms of further development and maturation.
The coming period will be interesting because of the launch of many initiatives, products, services and other related elements. I will follow these with great enthusiasm!
Personas & diversity: the art of omission and namingTomorrow at 12: discover the best Christmas commercials of 2024 in the free webinar. Register
On social media we saw it again: the budget shopper persona of Albert Heijn. #neverforget. In the slipstream of 'Black Lives Matter' and a social debate about institutional racism, the question logically returns: is linking a specific characteristic to a group of people - which you do with a customer profile or persona - indeed simply not desirable? Or is it still possible? We think so. In fact, if we deal critically with personas, they can actually help organizations to become more diverse and inclusive.
Before we venture into the ethical-philosophical issue, let's first return to theory. In their book Working with profiles and personas. The good of pigeonholing, Boudewijn and our colleague Natanja uae telegram data de Bruin distinguish between customer profiles and personas:
With customer profiles you can serve (individual or groups of) customers in a customized way. They are based on factual information, data that your organization collects and uses. According to the letter of the definition, data is 'hard', measurable and factually correct. Religious beliefs, race or ethnicity and sexual preference are - if all goes well - never part of such a data-driven profile. Under privacy legislation, these are so-called 'special personal data' and therefore prohibited to record.
A persona tells the story of specific target groups. Based on data and (especially!) empathic research, you identify a target group that shares attitude, behavior, emotion, experience, life world and situations to a certain extent. By bundling that in a persona based on powerful narrative elements, the abstract customer profile comes 'alive'.
Making choices in what you show
Both ways of representing target groups are partly derived from data and a segmentation of your (potential) customer groups. Hard data is information about customer value, user behavior and sociodemographic variables such as age, income, place of residence and gender. But usually personas are mainly built from 'soft customer data': preferences, behavior, attitude, motivation and emotional experience.
You always make choices in this, despite the fact that you base yourself on facts. You choose perspectives that are useful. How a customer uses a certain service, which task she wants to perform with it, how a customer identifies with a product, or what place it has in the customer's world. But also: how customers are in life, what emotions and thoughts they have about certain subjects, what interests or needs they have.
