External Research

When designing a brand identity you need to balance the aspirations of the company with the ways your audience already sees you: How do we want to be seen? + How do our customers see us? = your brand’s identity.

At Thanx we have the atypical challenge of having two distinct audiences: 1) The Consumers who use our free app to earn rewards from their favorite places, and 2) the Merchants that actually pay us to enable relationships with those customers. The Design, Product, and Marketing teams are constantly aware that our visual identity, our user experience, and our communications need to resonate with both these audiences, even though they can be quite different. I call this the Dual Audience Challenge.

I scheduled interviews with our merchants and created surveys we could send out to both audiences. The questions would be vastly different for each audience, with the exception of a few basic things like, “What do you think of our logo?”

“I think your logo’s a little gimmicky, it’s got a shopping bag, right? It doesn’t seem consistent with how you portray yourselves. I think of Thanx as a very smart organization, analytical, very to-the-point, and the shopping bag just doesn’t seem in line with how I look at Thanx.” –Howard Bloom, Owner of Proper Food (a Thanx merchant customer)

Developing Personas

Creating personas — sometimes known as user profiles — is just as much art as science. They’re equal parts data and vision.

Research only gets you part of the way to understanding your audience. If you only consider your current customers, your product will stand still. To build a brand that will grow, you have to imagine the customers you want.

To develop customer personas you typically look at data about their behaviors and characteristics, you send surveys, and conduct in-person user research. But you can only do that for current customers. You can’t do that for the customers you don’t have yet.

For example, your data might show that “we’re really big on the coasts but we need to grow in the Midwest.” But the data won’t tell you how your future Midwest customers differ from those on the coasts.

The personas you create also need to imagine how those future customers behave; for example:

How will they use your product differently?

How will they respond to the voice of your brand?

Do their shopping behaviors differ?

What phones do they use?

To get these answers, you can look to business objectives and market analysis. For the first, ask yourself where you want to grow your business; for example: a) increase number of merchants with 100+ locations by 10x, or b) saturate region X with new merchants. For the market analysis, seek out third-party research about those types of merchants or industries.

With data about existing customers and future customers, you have a story to tell about who you’re serving today and tomorrow.

Personas typically consist of three imaginary people who are indicative of your customers across the spectrum, two near the ends and one in the middle. They’re made-up people whose characteristics are culled from all the data you’ve collected.