Personas do not decide purchases. Criteria do

Every marketing deck has that slide. A stock photo, an invented name, age, marital status, hobby, and a quote in quotation marks the person never said. Maria, 34, lives in São Paulo, into yoga, values practicality.

Now answer this: what exactly changes in your business if Maria is 41 and into running instead.

Nothing. And that is the problem.

Fiction that feels like work

Personas became a mandatory step because they fill a real need: they give the team the sense that it understands the customer. The problem is that almost every persona is built from what is easy to find out, not from what decides the purchase.

Age, city, income and hobbies are easy to write down and explain nothing about why someone bought from you instead of the competitor. Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, systematized by Byron Sharp in How Brands Grow, shows exactly that: buyers of competing brands within the same category look very similar demographically. Whoever buys from you looks like whoever buys from your competitor. The difference is in the moment and the criteria, not the biography.

What actually decides a purchase

The best known example came from a study reported by Clayton Christensen about milkshake sales at a fast food chain. The company had detailed personas and kept improving the product according to customer profiles, with no results.

When someone went to observe actual behavior, a different fact appeared: roughly 40% of milkshakes were sold early in the morning, bought by people alone, to go. They did not want dessert. They wanted something that would last the drive to work and occupy one hand. The milkshake's competitor was not ice cream, it was a banana and a breakfast sandwich.

No demographic card would lead to that conclusion. Looking at the situation of use did.

What to use instead of a persona

Swap the biography for four questions that actually change decisions:

• →Trigger: what happened in the week the person decided to go looking. Almost every purchase has an event before it: they lost a contract, a partner came in, a competitor launched something, the factory doubled in size.
• →Choice criteria: which three things they compared across suppliers, in the order they compared them. That defines what has to be visible on your site and in your proposal.
• →Alternative considered: what you were really compared against, including doing nothing, which is usually the strongest competitor of all.
• →Blocking fear: what almost stopped the purchase. That is what your messaging has to neutralize before the person asks.

You can get those four answers in half an hour of conversation with five customers who already bought. It is not expensive research, it is a phone call.

The practical gain

Personas produce slides. Criteria produce decisions.

If you find out the recurring trigger is an investor came in and the brand got too small for the new story, that changes the first sentence on your homepage, changes the example you use on calls, and even changes which product you put in front. If you find out the blocking fear is I will depend on the supplier for every little change, that becomes a line in the proposal that resolves the objection before it exists.

Maria's profile card changes none of that, because you wrote it, about someone who does not exist, with information that does not influence buying. It is an exercise in imagination signed as research.

Real customers have already answered everything you need to know. What is missing is asking the right things and dropping the invented rest.

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