Like much of the country, I watched the Oscars this weekend. As I witnessed various Hollywood talent receive their awards, I started to reflect on what makes a good actor or actress. How do they transform from character to character, and how does this differ from who they are in real life?
As I got to thinking about this, I realized that the key to good acting is ethnography at it’s finest. It’s studying and understanding a character so deeply that you can embody them (the inside-out perspective, if you will). While anthropology doesn’t go as far as to try to play the people we study, in my particular line of anthropology I’d argue that we actually have a harder job in the creation of tools like personas.
Let’s start by looking at the Wikipedia definition for personas. It states, “A personality, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor.” If we took out the phrase, “played by an actor,” would that be very different from the definition of personas in marketing?
The marketing specific definition states, “Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.” What I’m interpreting is that the only difference is in the execution – actors “play” the character, while marketers deliver them on paper.
Ultimately when developing the marketing version of personas, both of those definitions apply. In developing personas, they should be real, believable, and hopefully Oscar worthy. They need to include such attention to detail that they can be used as a strategy and design tool. In some ways, I’d argue that those developing personas have to go one step beyond acting because their “characters” must transfer to the other players in the production seamlessly so that anyone member of the troupe can play that role.
Good personas are the result of a three step process: research to gain an ethnographic understanding of target audiences, the embodiment of those archetypes through analysis and synthesis of that research, and the creation of a performance of those characters that can stand up to the toughest critics.
So is anthropology that different from acting? Maybe there’s a career change in my future…Or maybe Los Angeles is getting to my head.
