Defining Anti-Persona's

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Note: Thanks to Behzod Sirjani (Fmr Head of Research & Analytics at Slack) for his thoughts on this. Learn more from Behzod in Reforge's Advanced Customer Insights program.

One of my favorite tactics to drive clarity is to explore the opposite. When it comes to strategy, initiatives, target audience that means not only defining what you are doing, but what you aren't doing. The contrast of the two provides a more complete and clear picture of where teams should be focused.

When it comes to thinking about your target audience that means defining anti-personas. A Reforge Member recently asked in the community the best approach to defining an anti-persona? Behzod Sirjani (Fmr Head of Research & Analytics at Slack) and I chimed in with some thoughts.

Anti-Persona's Are People Who THINK They Are Your Target Audience, But Aren't

When you define an anti-persona, stating the obvious is not helpful. For example, if I'm a new SaaS tool for marketers, an anti-persona of VP's of Finance is not helpful. The team knows that isn't who they are targeting (hopefully).

Anti-personas instead are people who think they are in your target audience but actually aren't. That means, they look similar but have some variation of the problem that makes your product not a fit as a solution.

For example, at one point HubSpot's target persona for the marketing tool were VP's of marketing in mid-market companies of certain types. The anti-personas were things like technical marketers, an enterprise marketer, or a small business owner.

They all generally had the problem that led them to a tool to be more effective at marketing, but they had variations of the problem that the tool did not serve well and was not designed for. As a result, these anti-personas would be high sources of low converting leads, customer support requests, feature requests that didn't make sense, and ultimately higher CAC and lower LTV.

What Do People Believe Your Product Does, But Doesn't?

Behzod added some good thoughts to this:

"From your business' perspective, there are certain things people need to know about, care about, and have the ability/agency/autonomy to do in order to be successful with your product (for a range of definitions of "success"). While you can educate people and help them understand why your product matters, there are people who won't have the right levels of ability/agency/autonomy to be a healthy, retained user. Being clear about what these abilities look like so that you can identify potential obstacles will help you define the kinds of people who are not your targets.

One way to do this from your customer perspective is to think about the various Jobs (as in Jobs to Be Done) that your product offers and think about where people believe your product does a job, but it doesn't. What are the conditions necessary for your product to be hired for that job and where do they fall short?

Brian's example of marketers who need a tool is a great one. I'll share an example of an anti-persona for Slack (based on my own POV, not the company's). Lots of people want a tool/service to engage/manage a large online community so they think Slack will be a great fit. However, most people don't pay for communities and often times community governance is quite loose. Slack has a message history limit on the free tier and no ability for people to block others or mute DMs, as well as few tools to moderate content. You could argue that given these features, communities are an anti-persona for Slack in its current form."

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