Let’s talk for a moment about Dungeons and Dragons.
That’s right, the game that was a sensation in the 1970s. A sort of board game involving wizards and warriors and all manner of mythological, Tolkien-and-fantasy relevant species. In it you and the other players created personalized characters who would then go on various quests or adventures through a world drawn up by the game’s host (called the Dungeon Master in the parlance because, well, of course), by rolling dice, usually 12-sided ones (which was in itself quite a mindblower at the time).
It's not the adventures or the maps or even the freakish dice that I want to focus on here, but the creation of these characters.
Each character had details that ranged from “alignment” (good, evil, chaotic, neutral, lawful, etc) to “proficiencies” (strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, for example), to lots of other things that I had to look up online and frankly my head is spinning. The point is, you rolled dice to see how strong your character was going to be in each of these areas. Like “well you’ve got only a 2 in intelligence so you’re kind of stupid, but you’ve got a 9 in charisma, so people love you and follow your lead” and on and on until you wound up with actually a pretty complex character – certainly something with a more robust personality than say, a thimble or a top hat or a shoe.
In many ways, it’s not that different from how we build “personas” in marketing, right?
We have a list of criteria and we fill in the blanks with data points – and if we don’t roll dice and apply arbitrary numbers to the criteria it’s really only because we haven’t thought to.
“Well, his education is a 7, which means ‘college graduate’, but his household income is a 5 which means he’s sort of living paycheck to paycheck. He says he eats fast food at least three times a week, which means he’s not healthy, so lets give him a 3 for that, and his credit card debt is a 2 which means he’s living within his means.” Okay, creatives! Go make some messaging!
But is this how people really think about the stuff of their lives? Or is it just a construct we’ve created in order to do our jobs? You know, like pretending that people really watch TV commercials during sporting events when we know that’s when they go to the bathroom. Or that likes really translate into purchases?
(I’m sorry, did I say that out loud? Ignore that. My bad)
I mean, Glenn Gould and Simone Biles are both dexterous, but they are completely differently so. If I needed someone to perform sleight of hand, I’d likely call Mr. Gould. If I needed someone to parkour away from a berserker, Ms. Biles would be on speed dial. Completely different.
Of course we’re not talking about dexterity when we’re making personas. We’re talking about facts like household income, which are hard and fast, right? But are they? On the one hand there’s the fact that the same HHI in St. Louis buys an entirely different quantity of things than it does in New York City. But there’s also personal context. Is this HHI more than their parents were making, and so they feel successful? Or is it the most they’ve ever made, and so they feel like their life is on the uptick? Or is it less and they’re economizing and they feel they’re falling behind? One number can mean a lot of different things to all the people we tag with it.
Now you may say I’m being ridiculous because we can’t get that granular for large national brands. They’re too big and touch too many people and anyway a persona that only applies to one person isn’t a persona, it’s a portrait. That’s true, but remember, personas were invented to help agencies be specific, in an effort to personalize raw abstract data in a way that would reveal nuances that would help them craft better strategies and messages. Because as anyone who does either knows, the more specific you are, the more likely you are to succeed.
The problem is big brands, because you need to be large enough to address their millions of customers, but you need to be granular enough to actually be insightful.
Sounds like a perfect job for AI, right?
Millions of data points culled, crawled, scraped, and analysed (sort of) in the blink of an eye. And indeed, increasingly I’ve been seeing chatter about how AI can help. “Now your personas aren’t carved in stone! You can adjust them at will! Dial up the HHI and see which banner ad they like! Give them more kids and find out if the messaging still indexes as highly! Hours of fun for a girl or a boy!”
The problem is that this just takes the fundamental flaw of how personas are made and amplifies it. The persona model itself was broken because we’d winnowed all the nuance out of it; AI just makes it broken-er, because it amplifies that lack of nuance. And the nuance is where the insights are. And if you don’t have those you can’t create something that people will actually care about.
I do think there’s a real opportunity here, however. And that is to combine the raw broad data points (HHI, education, health, whatever) with data about our own particular customers in order to understand better the forces that are uniquely acting on them in the context of what we are trying to sell them. Forces that, as anyone who has ever sat behind the mirror at a focus group knows, they usually cannot articulate.
Of course, to gather that data we’d have to actually start having real conversations with our customers – not just the customer service surveys tacked on to the end of phone calls, or the monitoring of the comments of the ones on social media, or god forbid focus groups. And we’d have to start actually listening to what they say, even when it goes against what the broad data says, even when it goes against what we want them to say, even when it doesn’t appear to make any sense. Because that’s where the nuance is, and that’s where the insight is.
Maybe some folks are doing this already. But if I get another creative brief telling me my target is “women 25-54” who “love their families but feel there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done” I’m gonna cast a level four fire ball and turn the whole agency into a bunch of zombie orcs.
Or something.