If you’ve spent any time in marketing, you’ve heard the term persona. Sometimes they’re called buyer personas, customer personas, user personas, client avatars, or ideal customer profiles (ICPs). The labels vary, but the intent is the same: to create a well-researched, thoughtfully developed representation of your customer that enables deeper understanding and empathy.

At its core, a persona is a fictional yet realistic profile of a typical customer or target user. Often presented as a slide or document, it pairs a name and photo with demographic details, behavioral traits, goals, and psychographic insights—bringing the customer to life in a way data tables alone cannot.

As NN/g’s Page Laubheimer puts it, “The whole point of personas is that they are memorable, actionable, and distinct from one another—they are there to sum up the main needs of our different audience segments so that we can recall and empathize with them easily.”

Types of Personas

Personas can be created with varying levels of rigor depending on time, resources, and goals:

• Proto Personas – Built on assumptions and existing knowledge. Fast and inexpensive.

• Lightweight Qualitative Personas – Based on small-sample interviews, surveys, or observations.

• Statistical Personas – Grounded in large-sample quantitative research, often following qualitative discovery work.

The right choice depends on context. If resources are limited, proto personas can still drive alignment. If the stakes are higher, investing in research-backed personas provides depth and reliability.

Cross-Functional ROI

Well-designed personas don’t just help marketers—they drive impact across the organization:

• Marketing → More targeted campaigns, stronger conversion rates, better ROI.

• Sales → Tailored pitches, sharper lead qualification, higher close rates.

• Product Development → Prioritized features and design decisions rooted in customer reality.

• Customer Support → Anticipated needs, improved service experiences, higher lifetime value.

• Design & Creative → Messaging and visuals that resonate more deeply.

Aurora Harley, UX researcher and consultant, points out common persona elements worth including: name, demographics, tagline, experience level, usage context, goals, concerns, and representative quotes. At Six06 Strategy, we push clients to go further—to create true-to-life portraits of real customers so every business decision is anchored in empathy and reality.

Most organizations benefit from three to six personas. In some cases—particularly in complex B2B industries—there may be a dozen or more.

Empathy Now, Empathy Always

The real purpose of creating personas is empathy. They force you to stop seeing customers as abstract data points and start seeing them as people—with ambitions, frustrations, and expectations that shape every decision.

Peter Drucker once wrote, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself.” Personas make that possible.

When you get them right, everything else—marketing, sales, product development, customer experience—aligns more naturally.

And it all begins with the right persona.