customer-persona

Overview

Based on "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford (2019). Traditional personas collect demographics and job titles. Dunford's argument is that the useful unit is buying context: the situation at the moment of purchase, the alternatives that were on the table, and the value that made switching worth the friction. A persona without buying context produces marketing that reaches the right person with the wrong message.

Where this method comes from

Dunford's five positioning components are usually applied to a product. This skill applies them to a single buyer, because her fourth component, "customers who care a lot", is the persona question. The components she treats as universal (alternatives, attributes, value) become segment-specific here, and that is the whole point: the same capability is worth different amounts to different buyers.