Customer Avatars

Let’s face it, if you’re building a brand you’re dealing with customers. Your customers, no matter what type of business you are running, have personalities. Getting to know your customers and knowing their personalities will help your brand connect with them.

When it comes to understanding your ideal customer’s personality, you need to create what is called a customer avatar. While customer avatars are often associated with marketing, having an avatar in mind while you build and maintain your brand will help you in driving your brand in the right direction.

The avatars you setup are fictional character profiles you create based on the attributes of your ideal customers. Many times brands—especially entrepreneurs and even large corporations—have a tendency to leverage their brand around the personal preferences of someone in the business. This is harmful and quite detrimental to your brand because what they often forget is that they (you) are not your customer.

Several years ago, while working with a division of a Fortune 500 company, I was in a planning meeting discussing new marketing ideas. During the conversation, a young employee kept shooting down every idea. The response after many ideas was “People don’t like when brands do this.” After hearing this on the fourth or fifth idea, I asked the person what data they had establishing that people don’t care for these ideas. The answer they gave was, “well I don’t like it, so other people won’t either.” This method of thinking, like I stated before, is detrimental to your brand. This young employee was not the target market. They do not deal with the same pain points that the target customers go through. There were so many differences that there was a distinct disconnect.

While setting up a customer avatar is not a quick or easy part of your branding process, it does allow for a better understanding of the potential conflicts you want to avoid when customers interact with your brand. To create your customer avatar(s) you need to work through a series of questions. You need to really think through the questions and answer them honestly. Research the answers; really focus in. The better you answer the questions, the better tool and resource it will become.

So, let’s look at some of the questions categories you should look at:

Avatar Brief Bio/demographic:

• Name
• Age
• Income
• Relationship Status

Behavior:

• Goals
• Values
• Pain Points
• News Sources

Interests:

• Social Media Platforms
• Hobbies
• Activities
• Books

Other

• Objections to purchase
• Role in purchasing
• Industry (B2B business)
• Number of Employees (B2B business)
• Annual Revenue (B2B Business)

Once you have all of the questions answered, what should you do? You can create multiple avatars. Refer back to the avatars often, by name. Over time, reevaluate your avatar(s) and keep them up to date. Your goal is to keep them in line with new interactions with your customers.

To help you out download our FREE avatar worksheet.