Jonathan Torrey

Spotify comes to mind with product marketing I really admire. The particular element of their product marketing I most admire is their ability to elevate listening to music and podcasts on the go, to a data-rich, "teach me something about myself" package at the end of each year. Dating back a few years, Spotify will summarize the time you spent listening to music and podcasts, your top artists, your top songs, your top genres, your top podcasts and other data points in a fun UI that is very socially driven. Toward the end of 2019, I saw lots and lots of social posts from people sharing the results of their year on Spotify. Literally almost everyone I knew, across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Not only does this product "feature" put the user at the center of the universe, so to speak, but it also creates shareable content that promotes Spotify and motivates other users to adopt the platform. It's an incredibly tough competitive environment - you have Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Fitt Radio, etc. How do you compete and differentiate? More songs available? Lower price? It's tough to do. But by using data about your listening habits (and who doesn't love to learn something about themselves) and packaging it in a way that it's very shareable, you just gave me another big reason to keep using Spotify. My runner up would be Fitt Radio. While I have not seen much product marketing from them yet, they have done a stellar job at identifying a need from a sub-set of the streaming music service customer segments. They specifically solve for fitness-minded folks who need pre-created playlists (from top DJs) to support workouts. I love Spotify, but Fitt Radio now dominates my use because I can easily find DJ mixes for anything from elliptical to heavy lifting. I was tired of my pre-created playlists on Spotify and their workout mixes don't always flow very well. They've clearly nailed the foundational elements of product management / marketing. I look forward to seeing how they can use product marketing to scale adoption. 

The shortest and broadest possible way to answer this question is that if a persona can help bring a client into a room with you, and it helps you be more decisive with both your product management and product marketing, then it is effective. I'll dive into this more below but first, some things to remember about personas. They should be specific down to a person and given a name. Broad categories like "Females Ages 26-32 who like dogs" aren't going to be very helpful. If you can picture someone physically sitting in a room with you and understand what they're thinking, what drives them and what challenges they have, you're well on your way. I always interview clients to help derive personas. An important element is to make sure you ask open-ended questions and don't lead to an answer. For example, I manage a video advertising product. If I ask a client why they love digital video advertising instead of "how does video advertising make you feel?" or "how is video advertising performing for you today?" I could end up with a persona that doesn't match how my clients feel or perceive their situation. It might help to write down the assumptions you have going in, to make sure you don't lead anyone to an answer. Now the harder part, measuring effectiveness: It's tough to point to a specific metric to determine the effectiveness of a persona. There are also some products that might not have a salesperson tied to it (like Spotify) but this is generally my approach: (1) Soft / suggestive / qualitative analysis - Leveraging client-facing team member feedback. When sales, customer service, support, etc. read through your personas, are they reacting positively and saying things like "Oh gosh, yes, this sounds exactly like client X". Are they saying "Yep, I hear this every day" or "I haven't heard this yet but it sounds like something client x would say" (2) If you have a product that doesn't necessarily require a direct salesperson (Spotify, for example), read the feedback/reviews of your product (this is great for creating personas, too). Say your persona has "voice controls" as their biggest need, but a majority of negative feedback is related to something else, your persona isn't going to be very effective. (3) This is also an opportunity to start quantitatively doing analysis and measuring the adoption of new features rolled out, compared to other roll-outs. If your new feature roll-out (voice control) isn't as highly used as other features, you could have a persona problem. If marketing activities are not converting to opportunities and sales isn't converting opportunities into signed contracts at the same rate as your average product, you might have a persona problem. There are so many ways to slice and dice it, but I think doing personas the right way - https://www.alexandercowan.com/tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories/#Persona this is the best reference guide I've seen on them - will make them more effective.