From Numbers to Names: Building Personas that Transform Strategy and Action.
Can you give a really meaningful gift if you only know the gender and age of the recipient? That’s how most people wind up with a scented candle or other generic item that finds its way to the trash or the gift table at someone else’s party.
But if I really know who I am giving a gift to – let’s say a passionate cook or voracious reader – my job gets so much easier. Even better if that person and I share a common practice or bond, maybe we’re both in a book club, so I am able to gift something that has real meaning for recipient. The result is real connection and appreciation.
Like a gift that reflects who someone truly is, brands can only connect meaningfully with consumers if they understand them beyond age or demographics. Brands that rely on broad consumer categories waste time and money on ineffective strategies. By moving beyond 'Gen Z' or 'fashion lovers' and focusing on real, data-backed consumer insights, brands can finally give their consumers what they truly want—and increase profitability in the process.
It’s tempting to think that technology can solve everything. Many platforms promise to know your customers better than you do, using algorithms to ‘automatically’ create experiences that stick. But the reality is that no tool can replace the nuanced understanding a brand needs to truly resonate with its audience. Technology is only as powerful as the people who drive it. Without a solid grasp of who your customers are—why they buy, how they want to feel, what they truly value—no automated solution will hit the mark.
Human-led insights, grounded in rich data and deep empathy, lay the foundation for technology to work effectively. Our personas go beyond surface-level interests to reveal actionable segments that allow companies to tailor products, CX, and engagement strategies in a way that’s intentional, impactful, and directly tied to business results.
Point of view.
Personas help you empathize.
Empathizing makes it possible to apply the human. Applying the human means that sterile numbers on a spreadsheet start to have meaning. You are able to interpret them because you better understand the why or motivation behind them.
Knowing this makes it possible to make the right decisions for your consumers, or at least get pretty close with hypotheses that you can test. You don’t need to survey them, you understand them. So now, you can actually take action, not just keep “studying” them like a good pupil or like so many companies I have seen.
What makes our personas different.
We work for action, not “interesting” but useless.
Most companies or marketing agencies, like Google and Meta, provide you with personas based on other sites viewed, interests, hobbies, etc. That makes them only client-centric and aggregate – no name and number. So, you will hear things like, “22% of your traffic likes puppies and long walks in the park.”
That’s not helpful to drive your business, especially if your business has nothing to do with dog products or services or walking shoes. What does that even mean? And on top of it, you don’t get a list of your customer base with its persona, attributes, and different segments on it.
Our approach to personas isn’t just about cataloging demographics or surface-level interests—it’s about building actionable segments that inform every aspect of your brand's interaction with consumers. With MLR Consumer&Commerce personas, you’re not only identifying who your customers are but understanding how each segment should be engaged, what motivates their loyalty, and why they choose your brand. This level of insight empowers companies to develop customer experiences, products, and targeted messaging that are not just relevant but drive measurable outcomes in retention, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
Everything we do is about finding the intersection between the consumer and your brand. Our personas are centered around the relationship the consumer has with YOU. Not the entire world.
They are linked to actual customers and their behavior so you can address them directly to the individual level. They create the basis on which you can start working both strategically and tactically. It’s the first step in your consumer-data-driven journey that will allow you not only to make interesting call outs with predictive algorithms and analyses but to actually ACTION them and get results.
How we create them.
If you have the data to leverage.
The most important data is what you are already sitting on. Too often, companies get caught up in the hype around Big Data or external information when the heavy lifting is done with your transactional data paired with product and other descriptors that you already have. But what makes them great is how we enrich them, working with your teams the entire way.
We make your existing data more meaningful.
Descriptive data. We further define your product, communications, service, and point of sale in a way that lets us understand your consumer better. That means adding an attribute to a product that explains an occasion of use or level of expertise necessary for application. It could mean describing your communications by type of appeal. Or it could be something that explains your different store formats or experiences. The important thing is that we classify all of the things that impact consumer selection. The result is an explanation of behavior – the motivation behind it – not just a laundry list of preferred product or favorite sales channel.
Transactional data. We create more than 185 attributes from your customers’ shopping behavior – looking at frequency, spending, price preference, location, product, etc. Describing the customers across all of these categories makes it possible to start generating a picture of who we have in front of us.
Additive data. We review and include additional data that can help us understand the relationship between you and your consumer. These include survey responses, pointed research, engagement information, traffic, or any other sort of input that will further color the persona description.
We start studying and hypothesizing.
Talking and Digging. We get qualitative insight from store employees, consumers, and anything else that we think could provide insight into your consumers and why they do what they do.
Clustering. We statistically determine what differentiates your consumers thanks to the attributes we created previously. Testing a multitude of attributes allows us to identify which of those attributes really makes the difference and explains why one group behaves differently from another.
We transform your clusters into personas. Using art, science, and much experience, we overlay a description based on a broad view of each cluster’s behavior plus the qualitative takeaways from our discussions with your front-line teams and customers. This provides a psychographic balance to the behavioral basis on which the clusters are created and will allow you to transform revelations into action: a customer group that churns quickly becomes easily addressable if you know what their strategic lever is. This will form the basis of all future action.
We fill in the blanks. If you are missing a group – like a strategic opportunity in the market, we’ll call it out by adding another group based on industry information or your own internal aspirational consumer.
All of this is provided to you in 3 deliverables that make up our Consumer ID(entikit):
Customer Clustering: The underlying, customer-level data with attributions and statistical output that you can filter and use as you wish.
Consumer Universe: An overview of your serviceable market - the consumers that are a match for your brand, including your existing customer base.
Consumer Dossiers: Persona-like descriptions, behavioral data, and the strategic lever to win with each group.
If you don’t have data.
We leverage the qualitative input and experience to create a good starting point. From there, the data collection begins so that these personas can be evolved over time with your internal data. This is the best way to start understanding what you need to know and collect.
Putting personas and their data to work.
Armed with both the big picture and the detail, you’re ready to work top down to bottom up and vice versa.
It’s important to know that we can personalize all the way down to the individual for every single piece. That’s what computers are for. But humans need to have bigger buckets to put things in in order to be strategic and create the right content, product, experience, etc. Your CRM team won’t necessarily share the N-variants of each campaign that are possible for distribution. The important part is to have a way to align and communicate internally so that big ideas and initiatives are clear – this is what the personas are for. The execution can go even further, eventually with limitless options.
Personas first.
On their own, personas make it possible to do the high-level thinking. At a company level, it’s how you define your Consumer Strategy (the next step in our UNDERSTAND pillar): which group to target, which lifecycle phase to home in on given the opportunity available and strategic fit with the brand.
From there, Product, Marketing, and Service teams will be able to create highly aligned strategy related to go-to-market. The big ideas that generate the right product, message, and experience for your consumers. (We address this in our DESIGN and CONNECT pillars) They then have the detailed data underneath to dig in and make those big ideas tangible.
But it doesn’t mean that you ignore customers on an individual level.
Detail first.
Consumers don’t move in groups. They move individually. And the line-item details will let you predict future action like who will churn, who could potentially buy more, and much more on the individual’s timeline. But a prediction without understanding the “who” behind it is hard to act on. But taking the information bottom up allows you to link your prediction to an offer and/or communication that ensures that you will intervene in the right way.
Practical examples.
Top Down. I know that I want to prioritize my profitable, Solution-Oriented consumer this year. That tells me:
Which product I need to focus on - products that respond to her biggest issues
How I need to communicate it - solution, results, not trends or emotions
How I should let her try it in store - knowledgeable salesperson, well-versed in her challenges and why the product works
How she needs transact - a quick check out
That’s where my big thinking is going to center.
Bottom Up. I have a reactivation problem – not enough people came back last year. That’s a big opportunity, so I decide to do a reactivation campaign since there is big news for this year. But I will use a different message and call to action for each persona so that it resonates and drives conversion. I start with the customer data complete with persona classification and attributes so that I can filter as much as necessary to allow for as much personalization as necessary - the framework is there.
Real-World Impact.
The shift to persona-based strategies doesn’t just feel good—it’s measurable.
Building out personas doesn’t just improve understanding, it improves alignment, clarity, and delivery, resulting in:
More Efficient Go-To-Market Process: With a clear understanding of who you’re targeting, product launches, marketing campaigns, and promotions become more targeted, efficient, and cost-effective. Persona-driven planning helps reduce unnecessary samples, streamline content creation, and cut down on misaligned initiatives.
Enhanced Consumer Experience: With personas guiding clienteling and customer service strategies, every interaction becomes more relevant and personalized. As a result, you’ll see improvements in conversion rates, retention, and customer satisfaction.
Targeted Acquisition: Personas also enable more effective acquisition efforts, lowering customer acquisition costs (CAC) by ensuring you’re speaking to the right people in the right way.
Focus for Staying Future Ready: Consumer expectations evolve, and personas are designed to help your brand adapt. By anchoring strategy in a clear, data-informed view of your consumers, you’ll be able to respond to change thoughtfully. When you know who you’re designing for, you don’t have to chase every trend to stay relevant. You can focus on adapting to the real needs of your core consumers.
Conclusion.
Technology alone can’t create the resonance consumers expect from their favorite brands. But when combined with an empathy-driven understanding of your consumer, it can empower your teams to deliver tailored, impactful experiences. MLR Consumer&Commerce personas bridge this gap, turning insights into action, guiding your brand in crafting relevant, lasting relationships that technology alone can’t achieve.
MLR Consumer&Commerce personas are more than just profiles; they’re the key to building a brand that truly resonates with your consumers—now and in the future. That is why they are the first step in our 5-step C(EO)X journey to consumer centricity.
Ready to turn consumer understanding into your brand’s most powerful asset? Let’s start by building personas that are as actionable as they are insightful. MLR Consumer&Commerce can get you there.
