April 1, 2011
Back in 2006 Hugh Macleod offered the following point on Gapingvoid: “If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives.” At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that “companies should define customer segments on the basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes” (p. 152) rather than constructs related to demographics. Hugh’s point made a lot of sense when I first read it and the point continues to gain in significance for me.
Hugh’s initial post sparked a range of interesting comments that I encourage anyone puzzled by the quote to read. The one point I’ll make about the topic is that nowhere in the post or the comments does anyone say what they mean by narrative gaps. I’ll attempt to clarify the concept below because it doesn’t simply mean stories. Stories that fill narrative gaps do so by purposively or accidentally creating personal curiosity, imagination, intrigue, or mystery for people experiencing them.
Narrative gaps in our personal stories are resolved through other stories about our own experience, perhaps with a product or service, that help us make sense of the feelings evoked. Specifically, Hugh noted in a later post that people fill in narrative gaps with meanings they construct from their own stories. It is on this point that the concept of personas becomes relevant to narrative gaps and to a recent conception of how to use social media robots, especially DigiViduals™, in qualitative research. Moreover, in this respect I suggest that the challenges involved are analogous to key ones faced by industrial robotics.
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2 Comments | 
Brands, Digital Ethnography, Experience Design, User Experience | Tagged: brainjuicer, brand persona, crowdsource, David Bausola, digividuals, Ethnography, Gerald Zaltman, Hugh Macleod, market persona, market segment, mass ethnography, narrative gaps, Persona, philter phactory, Social Media, social media robot, social network, storytelling, we feel fine, we-research, Will Goodhand | 
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Posted by Larry Irons
October 22, 2008
David Armano recently made a distinction between interactive advertising and social media which he depicts in the image on the left. He noted that many companies mistake interactive advertising with social media and notes that the two differ in the place of PEOPLE in the strategy. Specifically, David points out that interactive advertising involves Human-Technology Interactions. Whereas, social media involves Human-Human Interactions enabled by technology.
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6 Comments | Brands, Community 2.0, Experience Design, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged: community, interactive advertising, Persona, social media marketing | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
June 9, 2006
I started reading The Persona Lifecycle by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin over the past week, all 700 plus pages. The book provides a detailed overview of how to use personas, though mostly focused on interactive applications such as web design and software. I cannot review the whole book here, largely because of its length, but also because it does not seem like a book the authors designed for people to read through. It is more like a nicely woven set of concepts, practical insights, and toolkits around the topic of personas. In addition, it provides five original contributions, as individual chapters, by well-known authorities in user centered design. Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Brands, Customer Experience, Experience Design, User Experience | Tagged: Customer Segmentation, Experience Design, Persona | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Skilful Minds 