Buyer Profiling Week 8

The whole buyer persona profiling sounds very effective, but also very creepy. I never realized how much thought goes into every marketing campaign, every commercial, every Web site... If companies or organizations are doing it right, they spend hours and hours researching every little detail about their target customers. I find it weird that before I even visit a Web site, an organization has looked up where "I" go online, what television shows "I" watch, and what phrases "I" use in search engines. "I" refers to myself and the buyer profile that I fit into. I never thought about it before, but I can see how some companies and organizations really do use this strategy in marketing, especially in the US Presidential Elections of 2004 example where marketers targeted groups of people like "NASCAR dads" and "Security moms".

In the New Rules book, David Meerman Scott suggested even naming the persona. He wrote, "This should be an internal name only that helps you and your colleaguees to develop sympathy with and a deep understanding of the real people to whom you market. Rather than a nameless, faceless "prospect," your buyer persona will come to life." I'm not sure about his use of the word sympathy, I would lean towards the word empathy. Sympathy makes me think of feelings of pity while empathy is more of an identification with and desire to understand.

Scott's example of UGOBE's toy dinosaur, called Pleo, that they created seems almost superflous in the amount of work they put into correctly marketing the toy. I had never even heard of Pleo until reading this book. If it was supposed to be such an amazing invention, why doesn't anybody know what it is? Sure, there are probably Pleo fanatics out there, but shouldn't a goal of the company be to gain more publicity for their product after reaching the target groups? Anyway, they must not have finished the job because I never heard a thing.