What is your What?

I think i’ve hit a wall. My topic is no longer interesting to me and i’m not seeing the potential for this work. As an attempt to change course, I tried a mapping exercise to help me re-energize and refocus on my goal of helping brands live up to their potential.

The exercise works by taking an existing user persona and maps their needs across four categories. The categories include their needs, the context, the channel and the factors necessary to make it real.

For my purposes I chose to map out the needs of a brand manager. In this example Bozma is a busy executive who is tasked with brokering partnership agreements with celebrities and to keep her company relevant through paid sponsored events. Because her job is to be in the know, she sometimes gets overwhelmed by fast moving industry and has a strong desire to know what’s next.

The context is that her company has introduced new wireless headphones that will allow their brand to appeal to a wider audience. The CEO’s wants to make inroad with young urban kids that are into extreme sports like snowboarding and skatboarding. Because her company is known as a lifestyle brand she has to find the right kinds of partners to align her brand with. She is looking at sponsor events and endorsing the right athlete that lives the lifestyle that her brand represents.

The channels that Bozma will use to speak to her audience include special events, private music listening sessions, instagram and various other social media platforms that utlize lots of visual components.

Some factors that will aid Bozma in meeting her goals is understanding what this new audience values as well as learning how they interact online.  She will to meet with various lifestyle experts and attend lots of events around the country to help her grow the presence of her headphone company at these events.

This exercise helps me relate better to my target audience and help me begin to think about how I can better help her reach her goals. 

This process is good to do in small groups. As one person speaks the rest of the group jot down ideas on post-it notes. When everyone has written something down, then the presenter and the group can sift through the post-its to decide what to prioritize in each bucket.