Personas for Growth Design
Hello! In this article, I’ll share the localization process of the German Approach Sinus Milieus applied to the Personas platform focusing on Hurb Growth Design.
Ozzy Osbourne doesn’t have the same lifestyle as Prince Charles but they’re both 71 years old and have the same purchasing power. This sentence explains a turning point in the creative design process to be applied in experiments, marketing campaigns, and audiovisual. The reason is that demographic data isn’t as efficient as psychographic profile data for the growth design process.
Psychographic segmentation as opposed to demographic segmentation gives us greater clarity regarding consumer motivations. Understanding lifestyle and target audience preferences indicate users’ hidden motivations and behavioral triggers — which are essential for the growth process. That’s why groups of personas clustered by values broadly impact value creation, making us more assertive in customizing the product.
Sinus Milieus: Personas Platform
The Sinus Milieus is employed by consumer goods and services companies in the European and American markets to optimize product and brand strategies. This approach clusters social groups according to their beliefs and values, that is, according to their day-to-day decision-making standards regarding Work, Family, Spare Time, Money, and Consumption. That’s the reason for choosing this approach, to help us create strategies aligned with our national and international growth guidelines.
The Sinus Milieus ™ summarizes qualitative research findings in a comprehensive overview. In a single chart, it brings a summary of personas that helps teams to make the best decisions from the perspective of consumers’ lifestyle in order to attract, convert and retain them.
It is a global approach that clusters social groups in two aspects:
- ACTIVE, by lifestyle (consumption motivations)
- PASSIVE, by social conditions (salary, profession, and education)
Each group underlies its consumer desires and motivations based on the “most modern” group or with “higher” social status. Then brands and products directed for a given group may always be linked with the lifestyle values of the “higher” status group, meaning the “more modern”. For instance, at Hurb the Target Explorers personas mirror themselves in the Dreammakers (who have greater purchasing power and emotional security to choose adventurous and different destinations), or even in the Family Managers who manage traveling to “chic” international destinations bringing the whole family.
Growth Design and Personas
Exploring user’s intrinsic interests is the main component for the growth process. Understanding aspects of behavior optimizes the outcome helping us to create strategies and prioritize long-term sustainable functionalities. The significance of having personas as a starting point enables the context understanding of the platform used for Design, Product, and Marketing to integrate optimization and growth efforts.
Psychology studies have proven that our brain creates and shares meanings to make predictions around physiological feelings (fear, anger, uncertainty). Associating consumption with a certain physical feeling facilitates the brain’s response to protect itself, guiding us to adaptive behavior. The Social Sciences studies have also proven that we consume everything that helps us create a “higher class” social identity, which means a more modern upper class that feels more accepted.
On creating the Hurb personas Sinus Map, we applied an extensive set of interviews with varied profiles: TCV (theory of consumption value) above or below the average of the product, residents of all Brazilian regions, gender orientation, and diversity of age. We started raising insights after a 30-hour long analysis of in-depth interviews, grouping the speeches (evidence) by category. The creation of personas was based on recurring speech patterns of several users and experiments that then turned into insights. The speech analysis (usual in scientific research) also called “Atomic Research” in the UX environment was the methodology foundation applied.
We recently launched a channel called Inside Hurb to talk to our users about the Fanaticx team’s good practices. I shot a video about the Personas Hurb research process which I add here to the article:
