Somewhere in your company’s shared drive, nestled between the Q3 performance report nobody opened and the brand guidelines nobody follows, lives Jennifer. Jennifer is 34. She’s a mid-level marketing manager. She drives a hybrid car, loves yoga on weekends, and is “digitally savvy but values authenticity.” She has two kids named something tasteful like Mia and Lucas. She earns €52,000 a year and her biggest pain point is “finding time for herself.” She is your target audience. She does not exist.
The marketing persona is one of the most elaborate fictions the industry has ever produced — a literary character with the depth of a fortune cookie and the strategic value of a horoscope. Yet companies spend thousands of euros on workshops, consultants, and wall-sized sticky-note sessions to give birth to Jennifer, only to promptly file her away and never consult her again.
How Personas Are Born (and Die on the Same Day)
The persona creation workshop follows a sacred ritual. A facilitator — who charges €1,200 a day and owns at least one pair of quirky glasses — leads a cross-functional team through a series of exercises. What does our customer fear? What does she aspire to? What does she read? The team, composed entirely of people who are not the customer, makes educated guesses. Someone writes “LinkedIn and maybe TikTok?” Someone else says “she probably shops at Zara but wishes she could afford COS.” Everyone nods. Jennifer is born.
By the end of the workshop, Jennifer has a photo (stock, obviously — a smiling woman of ambiguous ethnicity chosen for maximum inclusivity with minimum effort), a name, and an origin story more detailed than most employee onboarding documents. She has a “jobs to be done,” a “day in the life,” and a quote that nobody actually said but feels like she would say, probably something like: “I want brands that understand me.”
Jennifer is then placed in a beautiful PDF, sent to the design team with the instruction to “keep her in mind,” and never spoken of again. The actual campaign is made for the CEO’s cousin, who saw a competitor’s ad and said they wanted something “similar but more premium.”
The Data Problem Nobody Mentions
Here is the uncomfortable truth about most marketing personas: they are not based on data. They are based on vibes, assumptions, and whatever the Head of Sales said loudly in the last meeting. Real customer research — interviews, behavioral data, purchase pattern analysis — is expensive, time-consuming, and inconveniently messy. Personas, by contrast, can be invented in an afternoon and presented with the visual confidence of a TED Talk.
The result is a character who is simultaneously too specific and completely useless. Jennifer is 34, but what about the 28-year-old who actually converts? Jennifer is worried about sustainability, but what if your actual buyer is a 55-year-old procurement manager who just wants the invoice on time? The persona, instead of clarifying the audience, creates a fictional target that the team aims at while the real customers wander in through the side door.
There is a particular cruelty in this process: the more detailed the persona, the more convincing it feels, and the more dangerous it becomes. A one-pager with a stock photo and a salary band has the aesthetic authority of market research. Nobody questions Jennifer. Questioning Jennifer means questioning the workshop, and the workshop cost €4,000.
The Persona Industrial Complex
The persona business is thriving. There are tools, templates, platforms, and entire methodologies dedicated to helping you build better fictional humans. Some of these tools use AI to generate personas from your CRM data, which is genuinely useful, though it does raise the philosophical question of whether Jennifer generated by an algorithm is any less made-up than Jennifer generated by a roomful of people eating catered sandwiches.
The larger problem is structural. The persona is a tool designed for a world where marketing teams need to humanize abstracted data — to give a face to a segment. The intent is noble. The execution is a game of telephone between your actual customers and a stock photo woman who enjoys weekend yoga. Somewhere between the insight and the output, Jennifer stopped being a tool and became a totem.
What would actually help? Talking to real customers. Reading real complaints. Watching real behavior. Conducting interviews where the person on the other side says unexpected things that ruin your assumptions. It’s less photogenic than a persona card, and it won’t look good framed on the office wall, but it has the rare quality of being true.
Jennifer Sends Her Regards
Jennifer doesn’t mind that you’ve forgotten her. She’s used to it. She lives in the slide deck between the market sizing chart and the competitive landscape table, eternally 34, eternally concerned about work-life balance, eternally waiting for a brand that finally gets her.
Meanwhile, your actual customers are out there — complicated, inconsistent, price-sensitive in ways Jennifer isn’t, loyal to brands Jennifer has never heard of. They don’t have a name or a stock photo. They haven’t been workshopped. They’re a mess. They’re the whole point.
If the absurdity of marketing theater is something you feel in your bones every day, you’re in the right place. The NoBriefs shop was built for people who have sat through one too many persona workshops and lived to tell the tale. The KPI Shark knows that the most dangerous metric is the one that makes everyone feel productive without doing anything useful. Come join the club.
