Marketing Personas Are Lying to You

A marketing persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer, built from real data about who buys from you, why they buy, and what influences their decisions. Done well, it sharpens targeting, messaging, and channel strategy. Done badly, which is most of the time, it becomes a laminated poster on a wall that nobody reads after the workshop ends.

The problem is not the concept. The problem is how personas get built: demographic assumptions dressed up as insight, job titles standing in for motivations, and a fictional name like “Marketing Manager Mike” that makes the whole exercise feel more rigorous than it actually is.

Why Most Persona Work Produces Nothing Useful

I have sat in a lot of persona workshops over the years. The format is usually the same: a facilitator with sticky notes, a room full of people who have strong opinions about customers they rarely speak to, and two hours that produce a set of profiles everyone agrees with because they are vague enough to offend nobody. By the time the session ends, you have a persona that is technically correct and practically useless.

The reason this happens is that persona workshops tend to surface what the business already believes about its customers rather than what is actually true. Sales thinks the buyer is price-sensitive. Product thinks the buyer cares about features. Marketing thinks the buyer responds to brand. Everyone is defending their own function’s worldview, and the persona ends up as a compromise between those positions rather than a reflection of reality.

I ran into this directly when I was working with a B2B technology client whose sales cycle had stalled. Their persona for the primary buyer was a CTO, mid-forties, technically literate, focused on integration and security. Reasonable assumption. When we actually spoke to a sample of recent buyers, we found the real decision-maker in most cases was a Head of Operations who had been handed a digital transformation brief and was primarily motivated by not looking stupid in front of the board. Same company, same product, completely different buyer psychology. The messaging that had been built around technical specifications was landing with the wrong person and saying the wrong thing to the right one.

That is the gap between a persona built in a workshop and one built from evidence. The first is a consensus document. The second is a commercial tool.

What a Persona Actually Needs to Do

A persona needs to answer four questions that matter to the people running campaigns and writing briefs. What does this person want to achieve? What is stopping them? What does a good solution look like to them? And where are they when they are open to hearing about it?

If your persona cannot answer those four questions with specificity, it is not ready to be used. Age, job title, and the fact that they “enjoy keeping up with industry trends” are not answers. They are filler.

The goal-and-barrier framing matters more than most persona templates acknowledge. A buyer does not buy your product because they are a 38-year-old marketing director who reads trade press. They buy it because they have a specific problem, they have tried other things that did not work, and your product appears to solve it with acceptable risk. Understanding the sequence of that decision, what triggered the search, what alternatives they considered, what almost stopped them from buying, is the intelligence that actually shapes effective marketing.

This connects to something I have thought about for a long time regarding where marketing investment actually creates value. Early in my career I was very focused on lower-funnel performance: capturing people who were already searching, already comparing, already close to a decision. It felt efficient. It looked good in reports. But a lot of that activity was capturing demand that already existed rather than creating new demand. The person who walks into a clothes shop and tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing online, but the shop still needs footfall in the first place. Personas that only describe the buyer at the bottom of the funnel miss the earlier stages where you can actually shape preference and expand your addressable market.

If you are thinking about how persona work fits into a broader growth framework, the go-to-market and growth strategy hub covers the wider context, including how audience definition connects to channel selection, positioning, and commercial planning.

How to Build a Persona That Has Commercial Value

Start with your existing customers, not a hypothetical ideal. Pull your last 50 to 100 buyers and look for patterns. Which industries or segments convert fastest? Which have the highest retention? Which generate the most referrals? That is your starting point, not a blank canvas.

Then talk to actual customers. Not a survey with five-point scales. Actual conversations, twenty to thirty minutes, with people who bought recently and people who considered buying but did not. The questions that matter most are not “what do you think of our brand” but “what were you trying to solve when you started looking, what else did you consider, and what made you decide.” Those answers will tell you more about your buyer than any internal workshop ever will.

Tools like Hotjar can supplement qualitative research with behavioural data, showing you where users drop off, what they engage with, and where friction exists on your site. That kind of evidence grounds the persona in observed behaviour rather than assumed behaviour.

When you have your research, build the persona around these components: the trigger that started their search, the criteria they used to evaluate options, the barriers that almost stopped them from buying, the channel or format where they first encountered a credible solution, and the language they used to describe their problem. That last point is underrated. If your buyer calls their problem “reporting chaos” and your messaging talks about “data consolidation,” you are speaking different languages and wondering why conversion is low.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes a related point about how growth strategies fail when they are built on internal assumptions rather than customer reality. The same principle applies at the persona level. You are not building a profile of the customer you want. You are building a profile of the customer who actually exists.

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Persona Work

B2C persona work tends to focus on a single buyer and their personal motivations. B2B persona work needs to account for the buying group, which in most organisations involves three to seven people with different priorities, different levels of authority, and different definitions of a good outcome.

I have seen B2B campaigns fail not because the primary persona was wrong but because the messaging was built entirely for the economic buyer and ignored the technical evaluator who had veto power. Or the campaign spoke only to the problem-owner and said nothing to the finance director who had to sign off on budget. Building a single persona for a B2B purchase is often the wrong unit of analysis.

The practical implication is that B2B persona work should map the buying group: who initiates, who evaluates, who approves, and who blocks. Each role has different information needs and different objections. A campaign that addresses all of them, even loosely, will outperform one that speaks only to the person you most want to reach.

For B2C, the complexity is different. A single buyer can hold contradictory motivations: they want the premium option but need to justify the price, or they want to act on impulse but are in a category where social proof matters. Good persona work does not flatten these contradictions into a tidy profile. It acknowledges them and builds messaging that addresses both sides of the tension.

How Many Personas Do You Actually Need

The honest answer is: fewer than you think, and more than one.

I have seen companies build twelve personas and use none of them consistently. The exercise becomes an end in itself, a way of demonstrating thoroughness rather than enabling better decisions. If you have twelve personas, you probably have twelve different messages, twelve different creative directions, and a team that defaults to a generic middle ground because nobody can agree on which persona to prioritise.

Most businesses need two to four personas. One primary persona representing the highest-value buyer segment, and one or two secondary personas representing meaningful but different segments. If you are in a category with genuinely distinct buyer types, a fourth might be warranted. Beyond that, you are adding complexity without adding clarity.

The test is simple: can your team make a faster, better decision about a campaign brief because the persona exists? If the answer is no, you either have too many personas or the ones you have are not specific enough to be useful.

Personas and Channel Strategy: The Connection Most Teams Miss

A persona should inform channel selection, not just messaging. Where your buyer spends time, how they prefer to consume information, and at what point in their decision process they are open to influence are all channel questions that the persona should answer.

When I was growing the agency from around twenty people to over a hundred, one of the things that changed our new business approach was understanding that the buyers we wanted to reach were not sitting in front of Google waiting to search for agency services. They were at industry events, reading specific trade publications, and getting recommendations from peers. The persona told us the channel was relationship-based and referral-driven, not search-driven. That insight changed where we invested time and budget, and the results reflected it.

This is where persona work connects directly to go-to-market planning. If your persona is primarily influenced by peer recommendations and professional communities, your channel mix should weight heavily toward earned media, partnerships, and community presence. If your persona is actively searching for solutions, paid search and SEO earn their place. The persona should drive the channel decision, not the other way around.

Creator partnerships are increasingly relevant here. If your buyer is spending time on social platforms and trusting creator voices over brand voices, that is a persona insight that should change your distribution strategy. Later’s work on creator-led go-to-market approaches is worth reviewing if you are in a category where that dynamic applies.

Keeping Personas Current Without Making It a Bureaucratic Exercise

Personas go stale. Markets shift, buyer priorities change, new competitors enter and change what “good” looks like in the category. A persona built in 2021 may not accurately describe your buyer in 2025, particularly if your category has gone through structural change.

The answer is not to rebuild personas every six months, which is impractical and creates churn. The answer is to treat persona assumptions as hypotheses that get tested against real data on an ongoing basis.

If your persona says the primary buyer is motivated by cost efficiency but your highest-converting campaigns are leading with speed-to-value messaging, that is a signal worth investigating. Either the persona is wrong, the market has shifted, or you have found a more effective angle that the original research did not surface. Any of those possibilities is worth understanding.

Build a lightweight review into your annual planning cycle. Not a full rebuild, but a structured check: have we spoken to buyers recently, does the campaign data support the persona assumptions, and has anything changed in the category that would affect buyer priorities? That discipline keeps personas useful without turning them into a permanent project.

Growth hacking frameworks sometimes treat audience definition as a quick step before the “real work” of optimisation and experimentation. That is backwards. Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples illustrates how the most effective growth moves are usually rooted in a sharp understanding of who the buyer actually is, not just what the funnel metrics say.

The Persona as a Test of Your Product and Service Quality

There is a version of persona work that most marketing teams never do: using the persona to audit whether the product or service actually delivers what the buyer needs.

I have worked with businesses where the persona research revealed a gap between what customers said they valued and what the business was actually delivering. Not a messaging gap. A product gap. Marketing was being asked to compensate for a service that was not meeting buyer expectations, and no amount of persona-informed messaging was going to fix that.

Marketing is sometimes used as a blunt instrument to paper over more fundamental problems. If your churn is high, if your NPS is poor, if your referral rate is low, those are signals that the product or service is not delivering on the promise the persona has told you buyers care about. The persona work does not just inform the campaign. It holds up a mirror to the business.

The most commercially effective businesses I have worked with are the ones where marketing and product are aligned on the same buyer understanding. When the persona informs both what you say and what you build, it becomes a genuine growth tool rather than a marketing department document.

There is more on how audience insight connects to commercial strategy, positioning, and growth planning in the go-to-market and growth strategy section of The Marketing Juice, if you want to see how persona work fits into the wider picture.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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