Personas technique: born inside User-Centered Design and imported into Advertising creativity

Abstract

Personas technique has recently been added to advertising creativity working processes, and its most widely used version in advertising is that known as Buyer Persona or Customer Persona. This technique is often carried out by creating descriptions of specific target audience groups or sectors, as well as trying to inspire either campaign creativity or a specific creative action.

This technique was born when User-Centered Design emerged, which is also known by its acronym UCD. Advertising has imported this technique together with some other new communications paradigms taken from the UCD field of knowledge. The addition of Personas technique into Advertising gave birth to a new range of creative formulas well related to UCD principles, such as User-Centered Advertising and User Generated Content (UGC).

Nevertheless, the implementation of this technique in its Advertising version takes very little time and it’s done in a very basic and simple way. The initial technique born in the UCD consisted of building up user-type profiles and using them later as a guide and reference throughout an entire creative process for designing and creating digital products. That’s the reason why the initial Personas technique requires an academic and professional review, that reformulates itself in a way that you keep all technique’s initial advantages as when you use it in any UCD context. The aim behind this paper is to spread out where the initial technique comes from, because of that most of all scientific literature that talks about Personas technique is related to technology. Adding this tool to Advertising Communications Research might be very useful, though this new-born addition to literature would have to keep all the initial Personas technique effectiveness.