Buyer Personas Are Not Enough: A Guide to Real Customer Empathy
- Angel Francesca
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Most sales and marketing teams use buyer personas. We create these semi-fictional profiles—like "Marketing Mary" or "IT Ian"—to help us picture our ideal customer. They’re a good starting point, but let’s be honest: they are often flat, two-dimensional sketches of real, complex human beings.
A persona might tell you your customer's job title and age, but it doesn't tell you what they are truly worried about, what motivates them, or what a "good day" at work looks like for them. If you want to create offers that people find genuinely compelling, you need to go beyond the persona and develop real empathy.
This is where design thinking provides a better way forward. It’s a practical method for understanding your customers as people, not just data points.
The Problem with a Persona-Only Approach
Relying only on buyer personas can lead to several problems:
They are static. Personas are often created once and then rarely updated, but your customers' needs and the market are constantly changing.
They lack emotional insight. A persona doesn't capture the fears, hopes, and frustrations that actually influence a person's decisions.
They encourage generalisations. When we market to "Marketing Mary," we can end up with generic messaging that doesn't connect with any single, real person.
Design Thinking: A More Human-Centred Method
Design thinking is a problem-solving approach that starts with the person you are trying to serve. It's about observing their world, listening to their challenges, and understanding their context before you ever start building a solution or a marketing campaign.
For example, a persona for a software buyer might be "IT Manager, age 45-55, manages a team of 10." Design thinking goes deeper. Through observation and conversation, you might discover that what this IT manager really wants isn't more features; it's a product so reliable that his team doesn't get support tickets on a Friday afternoon. He wants peace of mind. This deeper insight is what allows you to craft an offer that truly resonates.
A Practical Guide to Gaining Deeper Empathy
Design thinking can sound abstract, but it's a straightforward process. Here are the key stages applied to sales and marketing.
Empathise: This is about listening and observing. Talk to your customers. Conduct interviews. Watch them use your product or navigate your website. Your goal is to understand their experience from their point of view.
Define: Based on your observations, clearly state the real problem you've uncovered. For our IT Manager, the problem isn't that he needs more software features; it's that he wants to reduce his team's stress and out-of-hours work.
Ideate: Now, brainstorm as many potential solutions as possible. How could you help the IT Manager achieve peace of mind? The ideas could range from a new product feature to a better support package or a clearer onboarding process.
Prototype and Test: A prototype is a simple, low-cost way to test your best idea. It doesn't have to be complicated. If your idea is a new marketing message, the prototype could be a simple draft of an email. If it's a new sales approach, it could be a new script you try out with a few customers. Show it to people, get their feedback, and learn what works before you invest heavily.
Empathy in Action: The Airbnb Story
A well-known example of design thinking comes from the early days of Airbnb. The founders were struggling to get bookings. Their "persona" might have been "people who want to rent out a spare room in New York." But that didn't solve their problem.
So, they went and stayed with their hosts to truly empathise with them. They discovered the hosts were not good at photography, and the poor-quality photos on the listings failed to build trust with potential guests. They had defined the real problem. Their prototype was simple: they rented a good camera, went to a few apartments, and took professional photos themselves. They tested this by putting the new photos online, and bookings for those listings immediately improved. This insight, born from real empathy, was a key to their early success.
Learning to See Through Your Customers' Eyes
Applying this human-centred process requires a new way of thinking and some practical skills. It’s about learning to be more curious and to test your assumptions before you act on them.
Developing these abilities is the core focus of the Design Thinking for Sales and Marketing Innovation (DTSM) course at ClickAcademy Asia.
A Look Inside the Design Thinking (DTSM) Course
The course is designed to give you a practical framework for applying these principles. You will learn how to:
Conduct effective customer research to gather genuine insights.
Define problem statements that lead to better ideas.
Use brainstorming techniques to generate creative solutions.
Build simple prototypes to test your sales and marketing ideas quickly.
Gather and analyse feedback to continuously improve your strategies.
Ready to move beyond the surface?
To create offers and marketing messages that people find truly compelling, you have to understand them on a level that a simple buyer persona can't provide. Design thinking gives you a process for gaining that deeper, more empathetic understanding. When you start solving your customers' real problems, you'll find they are much more interested in what you have to sell.
If your buyer personas are more fiction than fact, it’s time to rethink how you understand your customers.
The Design Thinking for Sales and Marketing Innovation (DTSM) course at ClickAcademy Asia helps you shift from assumptions to real insight—so you can craft messages that resonate, offers that land, and strategies rooted in genuine empathy.
Turn data into understanding. Guesswork into results. Design what your customers actually need.
Scrandle puts you in the judge’s seat. Two matchday meals appear—only one reigns supreme. Can you tell which?