Publish at June 10 2019 Updated June 14 2023
For both pedagogical and classroom management issues, it's important to know and understand your students. A parallel can be drawn with a company's need to understand its customers. Marketing has developed the concept of "buyer personas", and in this text we propose to transpose it to education to define "student personas"
.What you need is a framework that provides a concrete overview of your audience, informing you of the profile of your current "customer" including their preferences, where to find them, what they want to achieve and the problems they face. Buyer personas provide this framework.
Effectively, a strategy that targets everyone ultimately targets no one. A company needs to get to know the typology of its customers in order to turn them into advocates for its brand. If your buyer personas are just vague adjectives and pretty pictures, they're only good for decoration. A buyer persona is not simply a description of your buyer. Data from your target customers is also used to reduce your marketing efforts so you can focus on a smaller group of people who will in turn want to become your customers.
The Buyer personas are modeled archetypal representations based on the research of:
The buyer persona tells you what potential customers think and do as they weigh up their options for solving a problem your company solves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence or a map of their background, actionable buyer personas reveal insight into your buyers' decisions, attitudes and concerns. They determine the specific criteria that drive potential customers to choose you over your competitor, or to opt for the status quo.
The same model and the same questions seem perfectly transposable to a classroom: who are your students, what are they trying to achieve, what goals drive their behavior, how do they think, how do they study, why do they engage in an activity? The student persona can highlight exploitable student personalities according to their motivational processes and choices.
Identifying these buyers can be the key to improving marketing ROI as you can tailor your content, advertising and website to focus on converting these specific people. The buyer personas help to better understand your customers (and potential customers) and make it easier to tailor your content, messaging, products and services to the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of different customer groups.
There are relatively few typical profiles in the classroom. It is therefore possible to establish them so that each student can find his or her way around. Thanks to this, you can adapt:
to focus on skills acquisition leading ultimately to learner certification.
Every student has his or her own personality and differences. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to create personas that will be useful in your classroom. Keep in mind that in marketing, the purpose of using personas is to better understand your customers (and potential customers) and make it easier to adapt your content, messages, products and services to the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of different customer groups.
Gaining a better understanding of students, in order to adapt course content and the form of teaching to their needs and behaviors, seems to be relevant. The students in a classroom are probably a more homogeneous set than a company's customers. Identify the people in your audience who share the same challenges and goals, and group them into their own category. These different categories will represent different personalities.
It's sometimes tricky to take up marketing concepts given that the teaching objective is fundamentally different. However, when marketing is customer-centric like our teaching is student-centric, it can make perfect sense.
Sources
https://www.mycommunitymanager.fr/brand-advocate/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research
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