Marketing personas

How can you create useful personas without falling into clichés?

1250 € per session, excl. VAT

In short

“Create marketing personas” is a private in-person session of half a day for marketing, communications and content officers or product managers and customer experience managers starting out with AI. It helps you identify the available sources of information about your customers and their reliability. Groups of up to 12 participants, in French, with exercises on your own work cases.

Why this training?

Personas generated by AI in a few seconds are often plausible but invented profiles that steer messaging in the wrong direction. The session shows how to use AI to structure and synthesise existing sources (verbatim customer comments, frequently asked questions, aggregated sales data), clearly flagging what remains a hypothesis. Running case study: ‘Lumen Optique’, a fictitious chain of opticians, wants to communicate more effectively with two segments: young working adults who buy online and older people who value advice in store. A set of 30 fictitious verbatim customer comments is provided. Application at work: The participant builds a real persona from available internal sources and plans how to verify the hypotheses (interviews, sales data).

Objectives of this training

  • Identify the available sources of information about your customers and their reliability
  • Structure a persona into useful sections (context, goals, barriers, channels, triggers)
  • Use AI to produce a synthesis from anonymised verbatim customer comments
  • Distinguish sourced facts from hypotheses to be verified within the persona
  • Translate a persona into three practical messaging guidelines

Who is it for and what are the prerequisites?

Roles and tasks concerned

  • Marketing, communications and content officers
  • Product managers and customer experience managers starting out with AI

Prior skills

  • No prior knowledge of AI required: the course starts from scratch.
  • You need to be able to use a computer, a browser and a word processor.

What you will work on

  1. What makes a useful persona

    Objective: Understand what a persona is for and what it must not be. Sections of an actionable persona; common pitfalls: stereotypes, unnecessary details, invented facts.

  2. From sources to trends

    Objective: Extract reliable trends from qualitative data. Anonymising verbatim customer comments; requesting grouping by theme; checking the groupings through random sampling.

  3. Write two personas

    Objective: Build well-founded, readable personas. Filling in the sections based on the themes; labelling as sourced fact / hypothesis; maximum length of one page.

  4. From persona to message

    Objective: Make the personas usable by the team. Guidelines on tone, priority arguments and channels; testing a short message against each persona.

What you take away

  • Persona review framework
  • Verified customer themes
  • Two sourced one-page personas
  • Messaging guidelines for each persona

Method and assessment

  • Short input sessions followed by immediate practice using the running case study.
  • Individual work followed by work in pairs, with peer review of the outputs.
  • Facilitated group discussion: what works, what needs correcting and what remains a human decision.
  • Preparation: Gather frequently asked customer questions or anonymised verbatim customer comments, if possible. Identify two customer segments to work on.

Observable criteria: Each persona explicitly distinguishes sourced facts from hypotheses; The extracted themes have been checked against a sample of verbatim customer comments; No identifiable personal data has been entered into the tool; The messaging guidelines derive from elements present in the persona.

Frequently asked questions

Can you create personas without data?

You can outline hypotheses, but the session stresses the need to label them as such and plan how to verify them.

Can you enter customer reviews into AI?

Only after anonymisation and in a tool authorised by your organisation; the session explains how to proceed.

How many personas do you need?

Only a few: two to four are often enough. The session builds two to leave time for verification.

Are personas useful beyond marketing?

Yes, they also help sales and customer service teams tailor their interactions.

Last updated: