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Using Personas to Revise Market Offerings and Branding

Our client was working with internal stakeholders on a brand redesign and new store concepts for their regionally based convenience stores. To ensure that revisions were both attractive to prospective customers and existing customers, our client wanted to dive deep into current customer personas. ​

While the organization had been discussing four anecdotal personas for some time, this effort was too big to rely on assumptions. The brand needed to identify and understand their current personas through empirically obtained data. ​

What we did:

Big Village developed a bimodal approach. Using a quantitative approach to identify and define our client’s existing personas, we then selected the personas of greatest promise to explore on a deeper level.​

We first surveyed 1,500 existing customers—gathering their attitudes, behaviors and preferences related to convenience store trips, purchases and impressions—yielding six unique customer personas. Four of these six personas were aligned fully or partially with our client’s future concepts for the brand. We then moved into the next phase.

Our qualitative portion of the research was designed to fully appreciate the similarities, differences and nuances across these four groups. We uncovered their motivations and deeper reasons behind their beliefs, experiences, behaviors and perceptions. We also asked them to rate concepts, proposed floor plans/store redesigns, and help co-create the ideal experience of the future. ​

The Result: Strategic Direction & Customer Focus​

The insights we gained from diving deep with the four key personas was deeply impactful. Our client made modifications, revisions and conceptual changes to align with customer desires. Knowing what resonated—or fell short—allowed the brand team to revisit and adjust concepts and floor layouts.​

Using direct advice from the customers and persona specific nuances, motivations and behaviors, a marketing and messaging campaign was also developed with specific, creative copy and design to address the brand’s key personas.