I first was taught to use a “customer profile” in 1993, as an entrepreneur attempting to delight CD-ROM users with high-quality content.  It was invaluable, as I’ll explain…

The exercise then was to create a group, a series if you will, of customer profiles that included demographics, psychographics, and even a “face” (clipped from a magazine) to make the profile more “real”… a methodology one of our advisers brought from Microsoft.

We found the technique invaluable, because it provided a shared vocabulary for the factors that would affect the customer’s experience of our CD-ROM.  In fact, just following the methodology itself was a way of focusing on the customer’s experience, rather than the product in and of itself.

This had the effect of reducing the internal conflict in the organization as our staff debated “what the customer really wants” — as opposed to the old “I” statements.  “Well I think it will be much more compelling if it was in green instead of blue” became “I wonder if Molly (name of one of the customer profiles) would find that compelling?”

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that my friend Jim Ewel, also from Microsoft, reminds us this month of the modern methodology for this (19 years later) with a far better name… the “Persona”…

I advise that you click through to his discussion here, which is in terms and process used in Agile Marketing.