The discussions emerged about user persona that is often done at the product level for product development. So, I developed a market persona for a financial field as an example for her to elaborate. I incorporated some of the basic SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, & Threats) principles in this discussion. Here is the synthesis of this "Market Persona" generalized for the finance industry.
The Market Persona helps to evaluate the representative group of industries (sectors, as people call them). For instance, the Finance industry is made up of banking, investment, and insurance sectors. Typically, these are mid-to-large organizations with 500+ employees and often they have some common goals or objectives to lower the cost of ownership of tools and processes, improve the overall visibility of work across the enterprise and the compelling adherence to audit and compliance with regulations, standards, and laws. These are captured on the left column.
Then, the SWOT comes along. Since strengths and weaknesses are internal to an organization but we are doing this assessment for the industry, one must see common patterns across the sectors for competitive collection of strengths and weaknesses. Most of the companies in these sectors benefit from the long tenure in the industry. Many of them have jumped on the digital transformation journey with responsive websites and mobile apps for tracking online banking, digital deposits, online investment tracking, etc. There are many conferences and networking events, to begin with, where there are many professional connections with other companies, standards organizations, and government entities. Their weaknesses are their constraints on budgets and risks are too many people movements (because the overall skills and competencies are the same allowing jumping the ships). Constrained by budget and challenged by people movement, their major dilemma is being able to continue coverage for their clients. These are captured at the top row in the middle and right columns.
Extending the same analogy, the next row captures the opportunities in the middle column and the threats in the right column. The "people risk" mentioned earlier also translates into opportunity because of the talent pool available. Besides, several competitive vendors and partners exist to get talents for contract-to-hire and many contracting types. Many 3rd party tools also exist (PMIS, ALM, SCM, CICD, Code Coverage, UX frameworks, Automation frameworks, etc.) that can get companies accelerate the tool adoption relatively faster compared to organic development (build vs buy, rent vs lease type of concepts). The challenges are adherence to legal and regulatory environment like Sarbanes-Oxley controls, Graham-Leach-Biley-Act Compliance, General Data Protection Regulation, Privacy Challenges, Cloud adoption and related Data security, etc.
Will the SWOT alone help you help you? No. We also need to know the type of decision makers and other policy stakeholders and lobbyists that we need to pick up. Remember that these are stakeholder groups rather than named stakeholders. So, understanding the typical titles that these stakeholders hold or the groups that they belong to help us narrow down the type of "buyer persona" that we should try to please and win support to land on a deal! These are captured in the two columns in the third row.
Using market research techniques, such as focus group interviewing, individual interviews, expert panels, pomodoro type of speaking engagements, webinars, surveys, and cross-marketing initiatives, we can narrow down further specific needs that these customer groups may need. For example, single-source-of-truth focused ALM (application lifecycle management) is often the preferred way rather than having multiple siloed tools (which often does not reduce the total cost of ownership). As companies jump on the digital transformation, they may require support with automation or agile transformation. Some may even require contracts such as the BOOT (Build-Operate-Own-Transfer) that is predominantly practiced in construction or petroleum industries (like new oil rig development). Furthermore, some of these immediate needs may not be immediately absorbed by the companies as the required capability instead of capacity becomes the sticky point requiring people to seek bench strength.
Based on all these SWOT, stakeholders, and immediate needs, the market persona helps us evaluate the area that one can play. These involve the engagement ideas based on our strengths, such as partnership ideas, reseller models, and staff augmentation models. These are captured in the final row. It is this engagement model that we can further evaluate (iterate on our SWOT) to come up with how we can play!
Dr. Sriram Rajagopalan's Market Persona Grid
How do you relate to this market persona?
References
Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L. (2012). Marketing Management. 14th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
