The Essential Persona Archetype Template

The mark of all successful companies is they truly get what their users need and want, how their buyers operate, and what makes their biggest champions and advocates tick. With that heightened awareness for customer-centricity, they are better positioned to successfully navigate the changing landscape and evolving needs of their target audience, introducing new products and features ahead of the competition, or entering new markets when new opportunities arise. Most importantly this takes a corporate commitment and cross-functional alignment that begins with a shared understanding of the target audience.

On the flip-side, for every struggling or failed company, the root cause likely traces back to a failed understanding of their target audience, which might have started with a bad product decision and/or a poorly executed go-to-market (GTM) strategy. Often times this begins with new products and features built with no business case – build it and they might not come! Or they may have foolishly aligned their GTM to an audience that either doesn’t exist, is not immediately accessible, or simply is not interested.

So what is a persona, or archetype more specifically? A persona is a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience, and the archetype represents a multitude of similar job titles (because often there is little consistency for job titles across companies or industries.) Personifying the archetype makes them tangible to marketers, salespeople, product managers and engineers alike. And by identifying similar patterns of behavior and backgrounds, every function can share a common understanding and indubitably deliver the experience each customer persona expects – without any additional oversight.