
Adaptive Persona Development
A successful buyer persona shouldn’t sit on a shelf in a powerpoint deck collecting dust.
“I met this wonderful girl at Macy’s. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.”
— Steven Wright —
As Needs Change, So Should Your Personas
We’ve been asked a number of times why Adaptive Personas are such an important part of our strategic marketing process. We get it—you’ve probably seen a million personas pitched to you by three or four different agencies—and if you can just get in front of them, your leads and sales will go through the roof.
The process probably looked something like this:
- Your team and agency brainstormed some buyer persona demographics
- You identified some important professional info like education level, career trajectory, etc
- You identified ideal job title/role, company size and type, revenue (sales people love this part)
- There was a focus on purchase influencers
- You discussed typical day in the life

- You identified pain points, challenges, and goals
- You researched sources of industry information, shopping preferences, and more
We have two challenges with these types of personas. Part of the problem is that often times, personas are treated as static “caught in a moment” snapshots of an ideal buyer. But, times change. Context changes. You’re often dealing with markets that are comprised of only a handful of buyers—and the photo with a few bullets of demographic information just isn’t cutting it. So personas are often discounted, or disregarded entirely, rendering them—and their associated marketing strategies, programs, and tactics—all but useless. The second problem is that we don’t actually have the most important piece of data we need to capture the persona when they need us.
This is where our personas are a little bit different.