by Kerry Juhl

Consumer Personas are a great tool for bringing your consumer target to life for your organization, to inspire growth ideas, new brand experiences and product innovation.  It is a representation of your target segment based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative data.  It summarizes your consumers’ lifestyle, values, needs, challenges, and preferences, so that it can be easily shared and digested across the organization.

At a high level, here is SIVO’s guide on how to build consumer personas: 

• Collect quantitative data via consumer segmentation: Start by identifying the market your product plays in and divide this universe into consumer groups that have similar characteristics, such as demographics, psychographics, and behavioral patterns.
  
• Identify patterns within the segment: Analyze the segments to identify common patterns, trends, and preferences among the different groups. Look for insights that can help you understand their interests, pain points, and buying behaviors. At this point, teams can narrow their focus by choosing one or a few consumer segments that are most likely to need and have the potential means to purchase the product or service that you offer.
  
• Dig deeper with qualitative research: Once the consumer segments have been identified, conduct qualitative research, to delve deeper into the consumer mindset and better understand what makes them unique and relevant to the business. Using techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, in-store shop-alongs, or in-home ethnographic research, you can uncover the underlying motivations, emotions and values that drive consumer behaviors and purchase decisions. This deepens the teams’ empathy and intuition about the consumer segments.
  
• Create consumer personas: Develop distinct personas that represent key segments that are important and relevant to your business. The personas should not portray one specific consumer but should be a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer within a segment.  Overall, the persona should include a name, age, job, hobbies, mindset, goals, challenges, and a brief back story.  Note: Psychographics, goals and purchase motivations are most important in understanding what problems the persona has that your company can solve.  
  

Building your Consumer Personas 

Key information that should be considered when building consumer personas includes:   

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, marital status, education, income 
• Psychographics: Interests, values, attitudes, lifestyle, personality traits
• Goals and Motivations: What they aim to achieve, what drives their decision-making 
• Pain Points and Challenges: Obstacles they face, problems they want to solve that are related to your market
• Buying Behavior: Where and how they shop, preferred channels, factors influencing purchase decisions, in relation to your industry or category
• Media preferences: Preferred media channels, social media usage, favorite websites, online communities

Check out these other SIVO blogs on consumer targets and  consumer segmentation, to better understand the inputs and context for consumer personas. 

Making Consumer Personas Interesting

The goal is to bring the consumer to life in an interesting and inspirational way. This information needs to be interesting and easy to read so that it gets internalized by the organization. Here are a few tips: 

Keep it Brief:  A good persona should be 1 to 3 pages in length.  Ideally, there would be a 1-page summary and if needed, 1 to 2 follow-up pages with actionable details and insights. 

Use Visuals: A persona should be visually interesting.  Use photos, graphics, or infographics to bring the consumer persona to life and make them feel more tangible and relatable to your team. 

Use Narratives and Quotes: Storytelling is an important part of building your persona. Use the data to create a short 1-paragraph narrative that describes the consumer persona – who they are, what they need, and their underlying motivations.

Include a Key Consumer Insight: It is important to include a one-sentence insight that describes the underlying motivation that would make them potentially interested in buying your product or service.

With the data summarized and visualized into clear and succinct personas, it is easy to understand and empathize with your consumer target, i.e., the segment of consumers that will inspire your growth ideas, marketing communications, promotions, distribution plans and new product innovation. Your team can now tailor brand messaging, content, and product offerings to align with the needs and preferences of key consumer targets. It is also easy to socialize the learning across the organization and agency partners in an efficient and effective way. 

Maintaining Relevance of Consumer Personas

Consumer personas are foundational marketing and insights deliverables that will inspire your teams’ growth ideas and guide your agency partners for years. For this reason, you need to invest in ongoing maintenance to ensure continued relevance to your organization. Depending on the volatility and competitive dynamics within your market, you will want to: 

The success of your consumer persona profiles depends on the quality of your research, the depth of your understanding and getting it to land within your organization and with agency partners. Regularly leveraging the personas while also iterating and improving upon them will help you stay in tune with your consumers and maintain a competitive advantage in the market.  

Your Source for Expert Customer Insights 

At SIVO Inc., we are dedicated to helping our clients understand their consumer targets by designing and executing consumer segmentations, following up with qualitative research and building consumer personas. We can then facilitate activation sessions with your team to develop action plans and strategies that leverage these insights.  

Reach out to us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or go to SIVOInsights.com today to schedule a discovery call and connect! 

By Leslie Turner – VP, On Demand Talent

Over the past few years, we’ve had the privilege of working with organizations navigating all kinds of change: leadership transitions, unexpected surges in demand, shifting priorities, and the ever-present pressure to do more with less. One consistent theme has emerged: fractional insights talent can be a game-changer.  

Not because it replaces full-time researchers. But because it complements them.

We’ve seen fractional researchers step into high-impact roles with speed, empathy, and precision. Whether they are brought in to lead key innovation or brand strategy initiatives, provide Insights leadership or optimize DIY platforms, they can play a key role in helping teams maintain momentum during critical transitions. And they’ve done it all while working alongside internal teams, to stretch their influence and impact.
 

So, what is fractional talent?

Fractional insights professionals are seasoned researchers who embed into teams on a flexible, project-based basis. They’re not just temporary workers but strategic partners, who understand the demands of the business. Often former heads of insights or highly experienced research consultants, they bring deep research expertise across methodologies, industries and tools. They work part-time or on-demand, but their contributions are anything but temporary.

"Fractional leadership is the next evolution of the independent contractor economy"

– Sara Daw, Fast Company, July 11, 2025

Why it matters now

Marketing research teams are under pressure, with tighter budgets and timelines often competing with higher expectations. It can be hard to anticipate what the next year may bring, and sometimes you just need support now.  Fractional talent helps bridge the gap by offering:

• • Speed to impact: Pre-vetted professionals can start contributing within days. They quickly grasp business needs and drive results from day one

• • Scalability: Whether covering a leave, leading a strategic initiative, or managing a surge in workload, fractional talent flexes with your needs

• • Cost efficiency: You pay only for the time and expertise you need - no long-term commitment or lengthy hiring processes

• • Strategic enablement: With fractional experts familiar with your methods and tools, they can focus more of their time on helping instill insights and action across your teams to move the business forward
    

They’re especially valuable when your team is trying to scale insights without compromising depth or rigor. We’ve seen them turn raw data into executive-ready outputs, design unbiased surveys, and bring fresh thinking from outside your category, all while working within your existing tools and workflows.

How to prepare your team  

If you’re considering fractional support, here are a few things we’ve learned that help set the stage for success:

1. 1. Define the role clearly: Log unmet needs over a week to identify where support is needed. Use this to scope the role and match the right skillset

2. 2. Establish communication protocols: Set expectations for check-ins, updates, and feedback. Use collaboration tools to maintain alignment 

3. 3. Integrate cross-functionally: Ensure fractional professionals are looped into the appropriate teams (marketing, product, customer experience, etc.)

4. 4. Interview for fit: Even for short-term roles, cultural fit matters. Look for adaptability and alignment with your team’s style

5. 5. Provide access and context: Share tools, background materials, and stakeholder introductions to help them hit the ground running

6. 6. Leverage for capability building: Fractional staff can train internal teams, create research playbooks, and establish governance for DIY platforms
      

Fractional insights talent might be the answer

Fractional talent isn’t a work-around, it’s a strategic lever. It allows research teams to stay agile, deepen their insights, and build internal capabilities without overextending resources.

Full-time researchers are the backbone of any insights team. Fractional talent simply helps them go further, faster.  If your team is thinking about how to balance speed and depth, fractional talent might be the answer.

For further insight into the value of fractional talent and how it could support your team, please reach out. We're always happy to share what we’ve learned, explore your team’s needs, or just talk shop about the future of insights!    

contact@SIVOInsights.com

by Jennifer Dilley

What is a consumer insight?  How do you know when you have found one?  What does it look like?

These are questions that every marketer or consumer insights professional gets asked at some point.  And while it might be useful to rattle off a definition in an elevator conversation, it is more important to internalize the definition so that when you are conducting consumer research you have a clear understanding of what you are looking for. 

Definition of a Consumer Insight

So, what are we looking for?  A consumer insight is an underlying motivation or need that explains why a consumer makes a certain decision or behaves in a certain way.  But that is not all.  When the underlying motivation is uncovered, it is only a consumer insight if it can be applied to a brand in an ownable way to unlock brand growth. 

A consumer insight identifies consumers’ beliefs and values that drive their behavior. It provides a deeper understanding of why consumers purchase certain products and dismiss others.   

Consumer Insights vs Facts

Be careful to distinguish an insight from a fact. There is a difference. A consumer fact is just a statement about a consumer behavior or the marketplace. Here are examples of facts: 

• Luxury cars account for 17.7% of all vehicle sales in the United States. 
• Luxury cars are often equipped with the latest safety features, technology integrations, and performance components. 
• The average transaction price for an entry-level luxury car is about $40,000. The average price for a flagship luxury sedan is closer to $100,000.

These facts are interesting and might be relevant to a brand, but they don’t explain why people behave the way they do. 

Consumer Insights Highlight Pain Points and Opportunities

Consumer Insights shed light on pain points for consumers and uncover potential opportunities for brands.  As an example, an insight from the findings above could be articulated as, “People want a luxury car to signal their lifestyle and financial success.” This is an insight because it taps into consumers’ underlying motivation (often more emotional that functional) and a pain point, resulting in an opportunity.   

• Motivation: People that have achieved financial success want to feel that sense of achievement and pride in their everyday lives.
• Pain Point: The initial cost and maintenance fees for a luxury car are expensive and often cost prohibitive, even for those who have achieved some level of affluence.
• Opportunity: Brand X should build car models that fall between luxury and mid-size car classes to accommodate varying levels of affluence.

Consumer Insights Must be Ownable

A consumer insight is only valuable if it is relevant and can be applied back to a brand in an ownable way.  If competitive brands are already addressing a specific consumer need and motivation, then the insight is true but not necessarily ownable for a brand. A good insight will inspire ideas and communications that allow the brand team to communicate brand benefits in a unique way.   

Note that an insight might link to a category benefit, but it can still be ownable by a brand, if it has not been adopted by the competition.

Consumer Insights Unlock Growth

The job of a consumer insight is to highlight the possibility for an emotional connection between a product/service and the consumer.  It provides brand teams with the context that explains how the product can be relevant in consumers lives.  Understanding the emotional connection between consumers motivations/needs and the brand benefits can fuel creative marketing ideas that will capture the attention and convert consumers along the marketing purchase funnel. 

Consumer Insights May Not be Overtly Articulated by Consumers

Note that consumer insights are deeper motivations that are quite often subconscious. In fact, a good consumer insight is often described as an “Aha moment.” Good insights tend to be simple human truths that we don’t discuss, but are still there, right under our noses. Because of this, specialized consumer learning techniques are needed. Ethnography, in-context observation, consumer diaries, and projective techniques like mood boards and semiotics, are required to dig beneath the surface of what consumers say to uncover their actual motivations. This may also require us to look beyond consumers values and lifestyle to macro trends – demographic, economic, pop culture, health, and technology trends that are also influencing consumer behavior. 

Tying back to the luxury car example, consumer perceptions are also influenced by economic and geo-political fluctuations such as, inflation, higher gas prices, climate change and the transition to electric vehicles. This can subconsciously change consumer beliefs and behaviors, leading to new consumer insights. 

Consumer Insights Summary

The best consumer insights: 

✔ Explain WHY? By identifying and articulating an underlying motivation, need or belief that is driving consumer behavior 

✔ Address a pain point or point of tension  

✔ Are ownable when applied to a brand/product/service 

✔ Unlock opportunities, inspiring creative marketing ideas that fuel business growth 

To discuss consumer insights with experts from SIVO, please reach out to our team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com

We can all probably agree that we are living through one of the most disruptive events of our generation. With our worlds turned upside down, it comes as no surprise that the way people work in America has also vastly changed.

Just as news stories cropped up about 2021 being the year of the Great Resignation, other stories followed asking the question ‘where have all the workers gone?’ I’ve pondered this question as well, seeing the ‘short staffed’ signs everywhere I go and hearing from countless businesses about their struggle to retain talent. 

The answer to what is causing the Great Resignation might lie in the reframing of the phenomenon. A smart colleague of mine, Vina Klein, astutely calls it the “Great Values Reset.” I really like that. It gives more insight to what is happening. People seem more attuned to their values when choosing how to live and how to work. At the start of the pandemic, we were sent home and we slowed down, we took stock, and we re-evaluated our lives. That experience impacted our choices in 2021 and beyond.

Trending

Do customers want to ‘hire’ your product?

Now enter the gig economy. The gig economy has always been around, but something interesting happened as a result of Covid-19. Gig workers represented around 35 percent of the U.S. workforce in 2020, up from between 14 and 20 percent in 2014. The number of companies that fully operate on gig work has increased by 85% since 2014. That growth has only accelerated as a result of Covid-19. As workers reset values and put more focus on having some control over their lives, employees are leaving the confines of a 9-5 and corporate bureaucracy. The gig economy is where they land, and SIVO Insights has the perfect launchpad for these workers. 

I’m very fortunate to lead SIVO Insights On-Demand Talent. I’m passionate about helping my consumer insights consultants find fulfilling roles that match their skills and talent. I’m also very much “in the zone” when I’m able to help our clients fill a specific need on their team or find the right talent for a project. Matching our clients’ needs with SIVO’s On-Demand Talent experience and skills is the best part of my job.

SIVO Insights On-Demand Talent allows people to choose how they want to work. It provides the flexibility and work-life balance that comes with the gig economy. For companies, On Demand Talent delivers flexibility, too. Whether an organization is struggling to find and retain talent or is  not in a position to commit to a full-time hire, tapping into SIVO On Demand Talent is a win-win!