Persona "Plinko:" using quantitative data to develop personas and define a target market
My client for this project was a company based in the Outer Banks of North Carolina that's interested in creating new service offerings for the annual tourist population. They engaged my services to help get a better understanding of the current landscape: who is visiting the area, what behaviors do they exhibit, and how can we define them more tangibly so we can design appealing new services for them?
This client had a modest budget, so my first step was to seek out existing research that I could use as a starting point. I was able to locate a study previously conducted by the local Visitors' Bureau - it was recent, had a large sample size (11,000+ participants), and used survey questions that could be tied to key data points for my client. I reviewed the survey results and also did some supplementary research.
After reviewing everything and isolating the key data points, I laid the data out visually. I then identified the three main combinations of traits + patterns of behavior, and used those to map out 3 personas: Jenny, Faith, and William. (continued below)
Now that the data was starting to form pictures of who the personas were, I conducted supplementary qualitative research and combined it with the information above. This resulted in the personas below.
My client now has a much clearer picture of who visits the area, what activities they engage in while on vacation, and what kinds of offerings might be most interesting to them. Our next step will involve mapping analytics to these personas, to understand how their offline behavior translates to their online activity.
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