Crafted by Alessia Clusini, Co-Founder @ Trybes Agency
TLDR
Once upon a time, we borrowed personas from theatre, then did something very consultancy-ish: we turned them into slides. This piece is about putting the body, voice, tension and emotion back into insight, so research has a better chance of entering the organisation and actually changing something. It’s also about my personal transformation through theatre. I share here, for the first time, my personal story and punk vulnerabilities. Be gentle, pls!
What does theatre have to do with consumer research? Nothing. And that’s the point.
Or at least, the starting point.
This is a personal story, and it explains how I got to this concept, so bear with me! I grew up in a small town in the countryside. I was a chubby kid, so shy I wouldn’t ask the teacher to go to the toilet. I was constantly surrounded by people, as my parents were part of a tight, almost cultish religious community. Somewhere in the discomfort between how marvellous my daring mind was and how awkward my body felt, an auntie turned up and suggested to my mum that she send me to acting school. And off I went, only to see myself transformed through my teenage years: this was the first sense of belonging and identity I felt, breaking away from the rules and expectations of my conservative education and community.
For education, I also went a bit alternative: I chose art school, then fashion at uni, then a masters in marketing and, finally, netnography and SNA. Along the way, I surrounded myself with a myriad of creatives, and met my fair share of scientists. I was equally attracted by both, and pursued both paths, driven only by curiosity, with no constraints or protocols. After all, I come from the Renaissance Valley in Italy, so cross-disciplinarity was pretty natural to me – I’d say normal, an everyday endeavour, a language I knew how to speak.
By the time I co-founded Trybes, 10 years ago, I was convinced that bringing together fundamentally different people was the key to discovery and to understanding complexity. I brought together a team of AI experts with anthropologists and psychologists: something we called Hybrid Intelligence, before AI was a thing in MR. It was essentially a cross-disciplinary approach where the breadth and scale brought by engineers met the depth of social scientists.
So yh, if theatre didn’t have anything to do with MR, then half of my job was done: just by bringing two very different disciplines together, I believed I could enable some sort of magic.
What does theatre have to do with consumer research? Everything, actually. Personas belong to theatre.
In ancient theatre, persona referred to the mask worn by an actor. It was a way to make a story relevant. To give a character a role, a voice, a recognisable presence.
So, originally, a persona was an embodiment of lived experience in front of an audience. It helped the audience engage emotionally with the story. If the story is embodied, we can feel the story.
Which is funny, because we use personas all the time in research, with the same goal: to make stakeholders care about the insights we bring them. With personas, we “embody the insights” as much as we can, so they become relevant for the people who need to act on them.
Marketing personas are very much like theatrical characters: we build them, name them, give them a face, a quote, a list of needs, a set of behaviours, maybe a cute little frustration or two. Then we place them in a deck and ask stakeholders to care.
And sometimes they do. But often, let’s be honest, they don’t… or not enough. Not in a way that changes how they make decisions on Monday morning.
Because somewhere along the way, research lost the plot a little bit. We borrowed the persona from theatre, then flattened it into a slide. We kept the name, the mask, the idea of a human type. But we removed the body, the voice, the contradiction, the awkwardness, the emotional charge, the context: the scene.
In theatre, a persona only becomes meaningful when something happens. A character is not understood because someone lists their attributes. They are understood because we see them wanting something, fearing something, hiding something, failing at something, changing in relation to others.
By definition, they are not static. In fact, they are revealed through tension and story development.
This is very close to real human behaviour. People are not fixed sets of needs and barriers. They shift depending on the room, the pressure, the relationship, the risk, the social expectation. We are different with a client or boss than we are with a friend. Different in a luxury store than when we are shopping on Amazon. Different when we are proud, ashamed, tired, scared, trying to look competent, trying not to be judged.
So, originally, this is what personas were, and this is what I designed them to be for our clients and partners: embodiments of lived experiences that make stakeholders care about the insights.
What if (finally!) there was a way to create impact with our insights?
I love my people in consumer insights departments. I speak with them all the time and I hear the pain they have and we have: we dedicate our lives to discovering truths about people and then see them sit on some decision-makers’ table. Politics, processes and priorities get in the way between our meaningful insights and the impact we should generate.
So when I first experienced a form of theatre presenting research, and I saw people laughing and crying about some truly peculiar paper on a hospice qual sample in a remote area of China, I thought: this is it. I had never witnessed the work of my fellow anthropologists create so much emotion. All of a sudden, everybody cared about anthropological work.
So I got to study a bit, and it turns out that our number one challenge in ensuring impact through insights is to make them truly felt by decision-makers, as in: emotionally internalised, as opposed to intellectually understood.
And that is where theatre comes back in: to embody insight, so it stops being something stakeholders can politely agree with and then forget.
What if we could sit decision-makers in a theatre-like setting and bring our stories to life through actors and screenwriters who embody human emotions and contradictions?
What if a persona was not something stakeholders read about, but someone they had to sit with, listen to, feel slightly unsettled by, maybe even recognise themselves in?
What if research was designed to make people act on it, not just understand it?
Because, annoying as it is for all of us who love a beautiful deck, humans cannot be transformed by a PowerPoint.
We do not simply absorb information and act on it. We remember what moved us, unsettled us, embarrassed us a little, made us laugh, made us recognise something we had been avoiding.
That is where change starts.
Read more about our Transformative Research Workshops here.
