Can ChatGPT Really Create Detailed Buyer Personas?

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about buyer and customer personas. TrendingUp listed it as one of their trending marketing topics for the month, while I’ve also seen loads of posts about using ChatGPT to build your persona profile … and even to get it to create some content targeting that profile. 

I wanted to address two things on this. 

1.     Can you actually use ChatGPT to build a more detailed buyer persona and depart from the persona one-pager that we’ve been using for decades?

2.     Why are personas – in whatever format – still so useful?

To start, I ran a test on ChatGPT. I instructed it that I was going to feed it some information about a customer persona and then I would ask it some questions. Information I fed it included demographics, size of business they work at, their painpoints, their aspirations, how they feel in their work.

Once this was established, we began the interrogation. Some questions were quite practical and tactical, such as how they stay up to date with industry developments, which events they might attend and which industry publications they might read. Some questions were higher level, like “what are you most worried about in 2023?”and “How do you build visibility and gravitas for the insight function within your company, particularly at the boardroom level?”

And I’m afraid to say, it simply gave back to me what I’d already told it, in slightly different formats and contexts. ChatGPT does not create anything new. It generates something based on what you’ve told it and a little bit of internet trawling (some of the industry publications, for example, were interesting not least because I’ve been in the consumer research industry for over 15 years and I hadn’t heard of them!) 

It did NOT constitute research into my persona. For example, look at the image where I asked it to share a time it felt frustrated: generic, bland and in some areas inaccurate.

ChatGPT answering our questions as a specific buyer persona: generic, bland and, in some places, inaccurate

ChatGPT answering our questions as a specific buyer persona: generic, bland and, in some places, inaccurate. It was, however, kinda nice to have it augmented for me in 5 mins. I particularly valued the ten things my buyer persona is most worried about in 2023.

Which brings me to my second question about personas. 

In order to get to anything for ChatGPT to augment, I had to give it something. I had to provide some demographic information, I had to share some painpoints and emotions. Without these, the outputs would have been even more generic and they were already quite generic. Which means the one-pager persona I have for the business was still very useful and very current and not something out of the 80s (which incidentally is when the first persona was created.) 

There’s a reason the format hasn’t shifted: because it’s useful to have key information about your ideal customer in one place to reference back to whenever you’re considering activity, be that marketing activity or new product development. Sure, it needs to be up to date and take into account trends and shifts in consumer behaviour, but the only way to do that is by talking to consumers, real consumers, real humans, who are buying and consuming your product or service. AI cannot replicate that, no matter how ‘legit’ it looks. This one-pager (or whatever format it’s in), is your company’s north star for that activity. If it’s in line with your persona’s needs and painpoints, then it’s probably going to resonate. Who wouldn’t want that north star? 

And for what it’s worth the blog post I asked ChatGPT to write in response to one of the painpoints was abysmal. Even after giving feedback, because it was just so, very, very bland.
Now, that’s not to say I don’t see a place for ChatGPT. I do and in fact, I use it regularly, but it’s only another tool in the toolkit – to get anything good out of it, you’ve got to put the good stuff in and then do a ton of editing.

And the same goes for creating a buy persona – you’ve got to put the good stuff in and the only way to do it is talking to your consumers.

Here is a template of all the key things you should be able to answer about your ideal customer persona. Do you really think AI can answer these?

Tagged: AI, pen portrait, Ideal customer, customer persona, Marketing