7 ms·

It was hilarious as an engineer who needed to learn marketing 101 for a startup, its pretty much just stereotyping your customers. "Wendy is a 24-30 yr old prof

• seem_2211 8y ago
  I covered stereotyping quite a bit in my university studies (I studied marketing) and the broad consensus was that stereotyping is a useful tool because it saves time. As much as we "should" judge people on the nuance of who they are and their individual character, we are presented with an overwhelming amount of information and we need to make a quick decision. This is why I've held the opinion for a while now that it's good to dress well. People are going to judge you and put a value on your time based on how you present yourself. Nothing wrong with maximizing your odds of that going well.
  • tejtm 8y ago
    True, I use it as a social filter to avoid my time being wasted those so easily deceived
  • lupire 8y ago
    There is something wrong with "dressing for success" -- it makes it easier for frauds to get jobs from talented people. but it's a locally optimal decision, and it's not your fault that people judge your work by your clothes, so it's defensible even though wrong as a broader social context.
• snowwrestler 8y ago
  I think you're talking about using personas. I'm not surprised that was your reaction, as personas are often misunderstood, even by marketing folks. The point of using personas is not to stereotype your customers but to establish focus sufficient to permit clear product decisions. In other words the idea is not "all our customers are like this" but "this is the type of customer we care about the most." Or more typically there are multiple personas, which allows you to create a matrix of product features with personas and again, establish priority for which feature to develop when, and how much to invest. I'm using "product" and "feature" here broadly, so for example even in an ad campaign, each ad can be considered a "product" with "features" like where it appears, what's in the imagery, what the text says, etc. You can run into trouble with personas if you start believing that they cover the entire range of potential customers. They don't, and again, that's the point: focus. That's why personas are sometimes given names and photos and detailed descriptions, to make it clear they're supposed to be individuals not stereotypes.
  • tobr 8y ago
    Maybe they’re supposed to be individuals, but the problem is that unlike real individuals, you made them up. You can’t learn anything from them that you didn’t put into them yourself. Only a real person with lifelong experience of being themselves can give you insight into what that’s like.
    • theoh 8y ago
      If you are designing for someone, you have to base your design decisions on what you have observed that person doing or saying. By your logic, generalizing from past observations of other people is never going to be enough to make an adequate design. So either you have to literally prototype each touchpoint (for example) with every possible customer (even the ones who can't articulate what they actually need), or the design is going to have to be based on insight into human nature and (varying) capabilities. Luckily, most designed things are simple enough that generalizing about users in order to discover the "right answer" isn't an unachievable fantasy.
    • IgorPartola 8y ago
      Look, if you take a group of 100 people who are into Warhammer 40k, chances are that at least 80% of them will have played StarCraft too. Collapsing that group into a single person and calling her Wendy helps some people reason about them. If you prefer to think of them a Venn diagrams and that helps you sleep at night, no crime in that.
      • tobr 8y ago
        But you’re not learning that from a persona, you’re learning it from talking to 100 real people. You can put that into a persona if you like, but it won’t give you any new knowledge.
        • andrewflnr 8y ago
          It's very common for a new perspective on knowledge you already have to enable breakthroughs in deriving new knowledge from it. In particular, imagining a person rather than a statistical abstraction will tend to activate useful neural wetware that simulates other humans.
• walshemj 8y ago
  It's all ok in marketing until you have "the time" :-) Btw this is what the "marketing gels" at Burberry still refer to the time when chavs got into Burberry check baseball caps. And this is a direct quote from a mate who works for a big 4 consultancy "gels" being the upper class young women who will be working there. I suspect that Mr Bannon wearing Barbour isn't exactly taken well by their marketing team.
  • ashildr 8y ago
    Gels?
    • walshemj 8y ago
      Its a joke about the sort of people who work in high end fashion in London - Sloan Rangers think Princess Diana.