buyer-personas

Overview

A buyer persona built this way is not a demographic profile. It is a structured, evidence-grounded account of how a defined group of buyers makes one specific buying decision — expressed in the buyer's own words.

Core principle (Kraus & Revella, Buyer Personas): focus on the buying decision, not the buyer's biography. Age, gender, a stock photo, and invented "a day in the life" narratives do not change a marketing decision and are explicitly discouraged. What changes decisions is understanding why buyers decide to act, what outcomes they want, what scares them, what they compare, and how they buy.

The deliverable is organized around the 5 Rings of Buying Insight + a lean Buyer Profile + top themes. Every insight is supported by verbatim buyer quotes with their source annotated. Nothing is invented.

REQUIRED REFERENCE: Read references/five-rings.md before extracting — it contains the precise definition of each Ring, the extraction prompts, the Success-Factor-vs-Decision-Criteria disambiguation, source-selection rules, and the faithfulness rules. Do not work from this summary alone.

When to use

• "Make/build a buyer persona for [client / segment / service]"
• "Turn these call transcripts / Fathom recordings / reviews into a persona"
• "What actually drives buyers of [X]?" / "Why are we losing these deals?"
• Refreshing or auditing an existing persona against real buyer evidence