Gregory Ebbecke

Greg- I agree with you that choice is the key ingredient in strategy. The options/choices my team has for “What the Fridge” seem limitless but we do not want to stray away from our original goal for that app. It is sometimes hard not to get wrapped up in all the different features we could utilize. Losing or straying away from our main vision can be easy to do with the many directions we can go with the idea. Your post has gotten me thinking of what “choices” would be best to go with for our app to succeed and provide a great first impression. Now I have my wheels turning on which companies or current apps would be best possible partners for us. Thanks!

With Zenbox, we had numerous options for everything we wanted to do. The data we collected from colleagues, clients and the internet pointed to a lot of issues that we can address through Zenbox for marketing needs and efforts. I think when it came down to it, we had to take all the data, sort it out by major pain points which can hinder progress, decision making, errors and client frustration/unhappiness and focus fully on those items. From there we were able to find commonalities which slowly pointed us into the right direction to figure out what we should really be focusing our efforts on. If we had spent additional hours
trying to solve all the problems, our project would be far fetched and not specific. We had a lot of choices but we had to use what we’ve learned and what our data showed to better position and focus our goals.

Agree – our group does not have a shortage of great ideas, scope creep is probably our biggest challenge as a team.

Re: customer choices. Yes and Yes. Our goal is streamline the choices a bit (maybe reduce some friction), by having a services that allows someone to absorb great content, take a spin with the wizard to find their destination, educate themselves about the destination, and book the trip all within 10 clicks of entering the website. “Botta boom botta bing.”

But I think that tag line has already been used.

Thanks, Greg! As a consumer, I agree that choice may seem like a good thing, but can actually be a tax. We make decisions all day long in our jobs and personal lives, that I find myself so frustrated when asking my boyfriend or roommates what they would like to eat for dinner and receive responses like, “I’m down for anything! What do you want? We could do Chinese, Italian, sushi, salad.. the options are endless!” It can be exhausting weighing all of the benefits or disadvantages of available choices. Sometimes, you just want the choice to be simpler when there are so many available options, but also feel confident in your decision.

For VERA, I think we can easily get caught up in all of the limitless “nice to have’s” and features we would like to add on as premium services, but these could overcomplicate things and we need to focus on simplicity for our customers, tying our features back to our value proposition in the mobile space especially when operating in such a sensitive area of healthcare.

I would agree that Personas are a useful and essential tool. When starting to develop a campaign, I start with the metrics and current behaviors of the existing customers/followers/etc. From there, we identify the target market and relate it to an existing persona or create a new one. The key is building a story. We can list a bunch of demographics and interests, etc. But, that doesn’t actually tell a story of the persona. Liek you mentioned, the brushstroke approach is not efficient. Psychographics help shape the storyline of a persona. I find that many companies think that once they create a persona, they are finished and never touch it again. Personas should be revisited whether it is a new campaign, product or exploring a new demographic. Some companies have 1 and some have 20.

I like to think of Nike. They position themselves as a company for athletes to be bigger, better, faster and stronger. However, my niece who is 8 wears Nike and my grandmother who is 96 wears Nike. They might not be their target market but they are still grabbing a wide audience. That doesn’t mean they change their messaging or how they market. Staying true to your brand voice and position builds brand authority. You don’t have to be everything to everyone. All of that to say, psychographics are still relevant to the persona development process.

I really like the Marketoonist now – thanks for the introduction. This meme is spot on.

I agree with you, Taryne. I the persona is best told as a story. Since it’s said that it takes a consumer about 7 times to see an Advertising message (whether consciously or subconsciously), to make a purchasing decision, an Advertisers dream is to follow them throughout their day and make it happen fast!

I know my information is being captured in scary ways – which is why I don’t own an Alexa device. However, the same thing is happening with listening on my phone but I accept that for the convenience (and everything else) my phone provides me. If I feel as though a product is essential for convenience or entertainment, I will give information, it just has to be worth it.

I found it really interesting to think about buyer personas in the target market section of our capstone research. For existing customers, I could easily draw generalizations about them. However, when I think about pivoting to different types of customers that I don’t have experience with, I find myself asking, “does this person I’m imagining actually exist?” LinkedIn is a great resource for being able to sort through profiles in my target range to gain more insight…and a great rabbit hole for the truly curious! For those professionals that “don’t like for people to know about them”, it’s hard to track down personal profiles and gain those psychographic insights.

I absolutely love personas. I really enjoying working on Zenbox’s personas which involved a lot of research and narrowing down who the right customer is for Zenbox. It really helps narrow down what my team and I should focus on instead of grasping at straws.
As a consumer, there’s nothing more irritating to me than being bombarded with advertisements for things I would never be interested in. Many times, when a relevant ad does come my way, I do click on it and dig a little further–that’s how I’ve come across some amazing brands. It provides me with a better experience online. I’d personally much rather weed through all the stuff that would never interest me versus having to scroll through useless ads. I think many other consumers may have similar thoughts/experiences. I guess it just depends on who you ask and how much online interest and engagement they have.