Unit 3: Insights and the Current Behavioral Balance
Lesson 6: The 5 behavioral archetypes
Instead of personas which are subjective, focus on behavior-based archetypes. Behavior-based archetypes will help you avoid bias and get clarity on customer groups.
The 5 behavioral archetypes are: Always, Never, Sometimes, Started, and Stopped.
These are MECE: Mutually Exclusive but Collectively Exhaustive. Everyone fits into exactly one category; they can’t fit in two (mutually exclusive) and no one is left out (collectively exhaustive).
We always begin with archetypes, not demographics like gender or age, to avoid relying on stereotypes. That doesn’t mean we may not take a demographic lens, but it should arise from behavior. For example, if we find there are far more female-identifying people who have stopped taking Ubers than male-identifying people, that can help us drill into what pressures they might be experiencing differently (like flirty drivers).
Another advantage of using archetypes is that they can be defined in ways that unite both quantitative and qualitative research. When qualitative researchers use a persona like “Silly Sally”, quantitative researchers can’t actually search a database and analyze that. But when you say Always Uber Riders (people who ride at least four times a month), that is a defined category that can be understood in the dataset.
Activity:
How would you define Always, Never, Sometimes, Started, and Stopped for our M&M project?
For example: “Sometimes” eats M&M could be “has eaten M&Ms between 1 and 3 times in the last month” or “3 times in at least two of the trailing three months.”
Offer up one objective behavioral definition for each of the M&M archetypes.