Psychographic personas vs. subcultures
A brand’s personas often share one bigger identity. Calvin Ross Carl shows how a subculture can act as a super persona that holds the radical buyer, core people, and fringe.
Summary
Calvin Ross Carl walks through how Parliament lays out psychographic personas: three to five people, with a radical buyer at the center, core people around them, and sometimes fringe audiences or nopes. A subculture adds a layer above all of them—a super persona that every individual persona identifies with.
Highlights
- Parliament typically maps three to five psychographic personas.
- The radical buyer sits at the center of the spread.
- A subculture works as a super persona that unites them.
Key insights
Personas need a common thread
Individual personas can drift apart unless something ties them together.
The subculture is that thread
Defining the shared subculture shows what every persona has in common and keeps the brand speaking to one world.
Detailed analysis
Calvin frames this as formalizing something Parliament has done informally before. Keeping the persona spread but adding the subculture on top gives strategy documents both the detail of individual motivations and the bigger identity those people share.
Conclusion
Keep the personas, then name the subculture they all belong to.
I think one way that it becomes helpful is the way we currently do psychographic personas. You saw a glimpse of that in the Peloton one. I’ll just pull it back up again. This isn’t quite our normal spread. We usually have three to five people broken out on here. We have our radical buyer that’s in the middle, we have our core people that are important to the brand, and then we might have some fringe people, maybe some nopes. It kind of depends on the brand.
I think what the subculture gives us is what we’ve called, in the past, super personas. Here are the individual personas, the psychographic personas, but then the super persona, or the subculture they all exist within, is this. All of these people identify with this subculture.