Your Brand Ain’t Your User

Posted: April 9th, 2011 | Filed under: Thinking | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Ever heard somebody say “Your wife ain’t your momma?” It’s usually in response to a man expecting his wife to behave like a mother would – maybe by cutting up his meat at dinner or reminding him to take a shower.

The thing is: if you’re a husband, your wife and mother are two entirely different people, with different needs and desires. I’ve never met a woman who aspired to cut up her husband’s meat, and I’ve never met a mother who wanted to marry her son (we know what they smell like at age 10).

And if you’re designing for a brand, it’s really important to remember that your brand user is not usually the end user. Look at the image above: it’s my own interpretation of Harley Davidson’s two target users.

Harley clearly has two user groups: their aspirational brand user and their actual user. As the brand user, the impossibly handsome and rugged Marlon Brando is used to inform their brand’s personality, position and promise. In the case of web design, this sets the direction of visual and emotional design, copy and imagery.

But if you think about it, Marlon Brando types aren’t really the volume customer of Harley, are they? No – they’re too busy riding to live and being impossibly handsome (and sadly passed away). The people who actually buy Harleys are the people who can afford them: higher income people, usually men, with cash to spare.

This is the businessman on the right. He likes to think of himself as Marlon Brando when he’s on his Harley. He’s probably a 9 to 5 businessman, and he has completely different needs and desires than somebody who spends most of his time on the open road, brooding attractively and causing trouble.

Brand Users are aspirational users, based on general market research. It’s the brand saying “if you want to be like this user, interact with our brand.”

End Users are the actual people using the product or service, based on specific research like surveys and customer feedback. They’re based in reality. It’s users telling the brand “this is who we are.”

You want to make sure you’re not using a brand profile for your project’s information design, interaction design and usability testing. A few pointers:

  • It’s common for marketing teams to create brand profiles based on the brand user. Insist on creating a persona that represents the actual end user, and make sure everyone on the team knows the difference.

  • Use your brand profile to inform visual design, copy and imagery; use your persona to direct functionality, content strategy, site structure, and labeling. Interaction design should be informed by both brand and end users.

  • For the purposes of UX design, keep the number of your end user personas low: no more than 3. When you design for everybody, you design for nobody. (Keep your long list of user types for validating functionality at the page level.)

Also remember: your user probably isn’t Marlon Brando (sadly), and your wife ain’t your momma (thankfully).