You will build two evidence-based buyer personas for your chosen brand. The rule: every claim in the persona must trace back to something a real person said or did — a review, a forum post, or an interview answer.
1. Gather raw evidence (30 min)
Collect from at least TWO of these three sources:
- Reviews: find 15–20 reviews of your brand or its closest competitors (Google Maps, Jumia, Instagram comments). Copy out exact phrases about what people loved, hated, feared, or wished for.
- Forums & social: search Nairaland, Twitter/X, or relevant Facebook/WhatsApp-adjacent groups for your category ("best suya in Lagos", "affordable personal trainer Abuja"). Save 5–10 relevant posts or replies.
- Interviews: message 3–5 people who match your likely customer. Ask three questions: "When did you last buy [category]? Walk me through it." / "What almost stopped you?" / "What would make you switch brands?" Note answers verbatim where you can.
Tip: you may use ChatGPT or Claude to help you cluster and summarise the quotes you collected — but it must not invent quotes. Every quote in your final document must be real.
2. Cluster into two segments (15 min)
Read your evidence and sort it into two distinct groups of buyers who want different things (e.g. "quick weekday lunch buyer" vs "weekend event caterer client"). Name each segment.
3. Write the two personas (30 min)
For each segment, write a one-page persona:
- Name, age, city, occupation (concrete, e.g. "Emeka, 34, runs a POS business in Surulere")
- Goal: what job is your product doing for them?
- Pains and objections — in their own words (quote your evidence)
- Watering holes: where they are online, when they scroll
- Buying trigger: what makes them buy today rather than someday
- Three exact customer phrases from your research, quoted
Deliverable
Submit a link to a document with: your evidence dump (quotes with sources), the two named personas, and 3–4 lines on how the two differ in what marketing they'd need. Add notes on what surprised you.
Reviewer checks: evidence collected from at least two source types; quotes are real and attributed; the two personas are meaningfully different (not the same person at two ages); pains written in customer language, not marketing-speak.