How long does it take to read Buyer Personas?

The reading time for Buyer Personas varies depending on the reader's speed. However, the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Who is the author of Buyer Personas?

The author of Buyer Personas is Adele Revella.

Marketing & Sales

Buyer Personas Book Summary - Buyer Personas Book explained in key points

Listen to the Intro

00:00

Buyer Personas summary

Name: Buyer Personas
Rating: 3.9 (48 reviews)
Author: Adele Revella

Adele Revella

How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

3.9 (48 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

Buyer Personas by Adele Revella teaches marketers how to identify their ideal customer. With step-by-step guidance and real-world examples, it shows how to conduct customer interviews to create detailed personas for more effective marketing.

Topics

Sales

Table of Contents

Buyer Personas
Summary of 8 key ideas

Audio & text in the Blinkist app

Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Learn everything you need to know about your customers.

Do you run a blog or an app? Or maybe you work for a marketing company or in sales? If you work in any of these fields (or countless others), the success or failure of your undertakings depends on how well you connect with customers.

If your messages chime with people, you will gather sales, shares and subscriptions; if you create a message that no one cares about, however, you’ll fail. If only there was a way of finding out exactly what customers want.

Well, there is! These blinks show you how to create a buyer persona, a complete story about your customer, what they want and need, and what they think about when buying. In short, you’ll never miss out on customers again.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why a company deliberately made their pocket calculators heavier;
why the best customer interviews require little or no preparation; and
what the Five Rings of Buying Insight are.

Knowing your customer helps you provide them with what they’ll buy.

Imagine you’re selling sofas – big, expensive, cumbersome sofas. Now imagine you’ve taken your product around to tiny, high-rise rental apartments in the inner city. How many do you think you’ll sell? Probably none.

Not knowing your customers’ wants and needs is a recipe for disaster. So when you enter a new market, it’s important to conduct in-depth research to understand your customers.

If you don’t do your homework, your prized products may end up gathering dust instead of bringing in revenue. Surprisingly, this is exactly what happened to Apple when they launched the 3G iPhone in the Japanese market.

In 2007, Japanese consumers bought 5 million mobile phones. The following year, when Apple introduced their 3G phones, they sold only 200,000 units – a mere four percent of the Japanese market share – and sold mostly to established Apple users. So what caused this massive failure?

Japanese consumers were used to shooting videos and watching TV programs on their phones, and iPhone 3G didn’t even have a video camera! Apple failed to realize that buyers in the Japanese market had different needs than those in the US and Europe, and suffered for it.

To learn about your customers’ needs, you have to ask them directly. Unlike Apple, the Turkish-appliance company Beko conducted interviews with prospective customers before launching their dryer in the Chinese market.

As a result of these interviews, Beko’s marketing team learned that a large portion of Chinese consumers believe that “there is a spiritual component when garments are exposed to the sun.”

So Beko designed their dryers for the Chinese market by making it possible to stop the drying cycle halfway through, allowing customers to dry their garments in the sun. Their diligence was rewarded; Beko dryers are selling very well!

Buyer personas help you truly know your customer.

Next time you’re at the supermarket, look around and see if you can identify what the patrons are using to evaluate products. Different customers have different criteria. For example, when selecting eggs, some customers will search for organic eggs, while others just want the cheapest ones they can find.

If you are an egg producer, you need to understand why different customers behave the way they do, in order to fulfill their needs and create product messaging that resonates with them.

Skeptical stakeholders can easily be convinced to implement buyer personas.

People often prefer the known to the unknown. And usually, they don’t like to venture outside their comfort zone. It’s no surprise, then, that you’re likely to run into resistance from stakeholders when you want to try new things in the marketing department. This is equally true when it comes to building buyer personas for your product.

Internal stakeholders, such as management and shareholders, each have their own reasons for rejecting buyer personas. Some think the project will be a cumbersome time sink, and that the resources invested in identifying the personas will never be recouped.

Use an internal or external database to reach your target customers.

Once you’ve gotten the internal stakeholder onboard, you need to actually create the buyer personas. This work begins with setting up interviews with potential customers. But how should you reach out to them?

First, you need to find your customers, and that will require the help of your sales team.

Unearthing helpful answers requires your asking good questions and listening well.

The key to learning the most from interviewees is to spend more time listening and less time speaking. Ask your question, and then get out of the way.

In a buyer persona interview, the only question you need to prepare for and think about beforehand is the very first question you ask. Ultimately, your first question will be about the first time the interviewee realized that he faced a problem that required him to seek out a new solution.

Analyze your buyers’ insights to discover their needs and how to accommodate them.

There is an old Egyptian saying that goes like this: “Do you know so and so? Yes. Did you hobnob with him? No. Well, then you don’t know him.” The same applies to your buyers. You can’t presume to know them if you never talk to them.

To understand buyers’ behavior, you have to talk to them and uncover the Five Rings of Buying Insights. Doing this will tell you everything you need to know about your buyers’ decisions.

Organize your interview data in order to develop actionable insights.

So, after gathering the data, what’s next? Now comes the careful analysis. Remember: you aren’t just looking for data that confirms what you already believe. Rather, you want to stay as objective as possible in order to discover what the customer truly needs.

So where do you start?

Create a message that tells the buyer what they want to hear.

“We have the best solution.” “We’re the cheapest.” “ Our solution will save you money.” Do these kinds of messages inspire you to buy? It’s more than likely that these are the kinds of messages that you completely ignore. This is because the messages don’t speak to you and your unique concerns.

With the results of your interviews, you are now equipped to address your buyers’ unique, primary concerns.

Want to see all full key ideas from Buyer Personas?

Key ideas in Buyer Personas

More knowledge in less time

Read or listen

Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.

Find your next read

Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.

Shortcasts ^New

We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.

What is Buyer Personas about?

It’s hard to sell to people that you don’t know. Buyer Personas (2015) gives you the tools you need to truly understand your customers – their motivations, their quirks, their reservations – so that you can fine-tune your messaging to become a maximally effective seller.

Buyer Personas Review

Buyer Personas (2015) by Adele Revella is a must-read for anyone in marketing and sales. Here's why this book stands out:

It provides a thorough framework for creating accurate buyer personas, ensuring businesses truly understand their target audience.
By using real-world examples and actionable advice, the book helps marketers successfully tailor their messaging and offerings to meet customer needs.
The book's practical approach makes it an engaging read that avoids the typical dryness of marketing textbooks, making it definitely not boring.

Best quote from Buyer Personas

As much as we may like to think of ourselves as open-minded, most peoples initial response to a new idea in resistance.

—Adele Revella

Who should read Buyer Personas?

Marketing executives
Company leaders who are looking for a product market
Anyone who wants to be a better communicator

About the Author

Adele Revella is the CEO and founder of Buyer Persona Institute, and a leading authority on buyer personas. In addition to running the Institute, she is also a marketing and business leadership speaker, consultant, blogger and workshop facilitator.

[Adele Revella: Buyer Personas] copyright [2015], John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons [Inc. or Ltd. as applicable] and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.

Categories with Buyer Personas

Marketing & Sales

Book summaries like Buyer Personas

Influence

Robert B. Cialdini

The Psychology of Persuasion

Learn, Lead, and Live Without Barriers

How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses

The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

The New Psychology of Success

STILL the Proven Way to Personalize Sales and Achieve Astounding Results

How to Start Conversations that Get Results

15 min

4.3

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

23 min

4.6

Super Thinking

Gabriel Weinberg with Lauren McCann

The Big Book of Mental Models

22 min

4.3

Start Now. Get Perfect Later.

Rob Moore

Make Quick, Smart Decisions, and Overcome Procrastination

How to Win at Dating, Marriage, and Sex

23 min

2.9

Your Money or Your Life

Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez

9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

26 min

4.2

Digital Body Language

Erica Dhawan

How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance

28 min

4.4

Never Lose A Customer Again

Joey Coleman

Turn Any Sale Into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days

Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game

18 min

4.1

The Importance of Being Little

Erika Christakis

What Preschoolers Really Need From Grown-Ups

13 min

3.9

The Four Agreements

Don Miguel Ruiz & Janet Mills

A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. A Toltec Wisdom Book

Methods for Clear Thinking and Analysis in Everyday Situations from the Greatest Thinkers in History

20 min

4.0

The Success Principles

Jack Canfield

How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Little Things That Can Change Your Life… And Maybe The World

11 min

4.0

Forgiving What You Can't Forget

Lysa TerKeurst

Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

25 min

3.5

The Effective Executive

Peter F. Drucker

The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths and Everyone in Between

18 min

4.1

You Are a Badass at Making Money

Jen Sincero

Master the Mindset of Wealth

14 min

3.6

The Algebra of Wealth

Scott Galloway

A Simple Formula for Financial Security

Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success

Advice from the Chairman of the Board

18 min

4.4

Getting Past Your Breakup

Susan J. Elliott

How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

Letting Go of Having It All

27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single

Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

You Are Not a To Do List

18 min

4.4

How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital

Nathan Latka

The Four Rules You Must Break to Get Rich

Improve your life by only focusing on the essentials

A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less

The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation

15 min

4.1

The Happiness Advantage

Shawn Achor

The Seven Principles that Fuel Success and Performance at Work

Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery

9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived Longest

Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In

Can You Learn to be Happy?

Stop Drama, Eliminate Entitlement, Maximize Results

The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics

17 min

3.5

How Big Things Get Done

Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration

15 min

4.0

Leadership Strategy and Tactics

Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler

Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com

17 min

4.1

Building Social Business

Muhammad Yunus

The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs

11 min

4.1

People ❤️ Blinkist

Sven O.

It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.

Thi Viet Quynh N.

Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.

Jonathan A.

Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.

Renee D.

Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.