For years, marketers have built personas to better understand customers.
Teams spent time thinking intentionally about who they were trying to reach, what mattered to them, what pressures they were facing, and what might influence a decision.
Personas gave businesses a shared understanding of the customer.
Then the marketing team used personas to shape messaging. Sales teams used them to prepare for conversations. Product teams used them to think through customer needs. Leadership teams used them to guide strategy and positioning.
The process itself mattered…a lot.
Then speed became the priority.
Marketing teams needed campaigns to launch faster. Sales teams needed leads more quickly. Businesses became more focused on short-term metrics and constant content production.
Without even knowing, customer understanding slowly turned into static documents sitting untouched in folders no one had time to open again.
Markets changed. Customer expectations changed. Buying behaviour changed. Decision-making became more layered.
Eventually, personas began to feel disconnected from reality.
Then came the dramatic POVs.
“Traditional personas are dead.” “Personas don’t work anymore.” “Stop wasting time building avatars.”
Honestly, if something is genuinely useful to your business, it does not really matter what the latest expert says online.
Personas have been called many things over the years: ICPs, avatars, buyer profiles, customer segments.
Pick whatever label you want.
The important part is not skipping intentional customer understanding that can be shared across teams. Clear customer understanding makes decision-making easier in marketing, sales, product development, customer service, and leadership conversations.
Strong personas were never meant to be rigid, linear documents that ignore how customers actually make decisions.
They can reflect whatever depth of customer research a business is willing to invest time and money into. Some may stay at a high level. Others may become deeply behavioural and insight-driven.
The format matters far less than the thinking behind it.
The death of personas does not change the need to fundamentally understand your customers.
From my perspective, personas are still very much alive.
The Real Problem Was Never Personas
Frustration with personas usually started once they became disconnected from how customers actually make decisions.
Many businesses built personas as descriptive exercises rather than decision-making tools. The focus stayed on surface-level details: job titles, company size, industry, pain points, and demographics.
Real buying behaviour is far more layered than that.
Customers evaluate risk differently. Confidence is built through different signals. Priorities shift depending on timing, internal pressure, previous experiences, urgency, budget conversations, leadership expectations, and the level of uncertainty surrounding a decision.
A customer researching solutions during a stable growth period often approaches decisions very differently from a customer navigating operational pressure or internal scrutiny.
That complexity rarely fits neatly into persona templates simply because it feels complicated, and it is easier to go and run “experiments”.
Research published in the Journal of Business Research found that many B2B segmentation approaches still rely heavily on broad B2C-style models that struggle to reflect actual buying behaviour and practical decision-making within organizations.
A large part of the problem stems from treating personas as categories rather than as context.
Teams start describing customers instead of understanding how decisions are shaped over time. Customers rarely want to feel reduced to a segment, a title, or a simplified profile.
People want to feel understood in the context of what they are trying to accomplish, what concerns they are navigating, and what trade-offs they are weighing internally.
That distinction matters more than many businesses realize.
Two customers may look nearly identical inside a CRM. Same title. Same industry. Same company size.
One may be trying to reduce operational risk after a failed implementation. Another may be under pressure from leadership to move quickly. Another may be trying to justify spending internally while protecting their reputation if the decision goes poorly.
Those differences shape decision-making.
Traditional personas often flatten those realities into generalized assumptions that feel clean and organized internally while missing the complexity customers are actually navigating.
Customers now face more information, more alternatives, more internal stakeholders, and more pressure to make the right decision than ever before.
The Problem Stage Has Become Much Bigger
One of the biggest shifts in buying behaviour is the much larger role the problem stage now plays.
Customers spend far more time trying to define, validate, compare, and fully understand the problem before they ever feel ready to move toward a solution. Customers do so much independent research before they even consider reaching out to a business or a sales rep. It is wild!
That shift changes how businesses need to think about customer understanding.
Many companies still approach marketing as though customers are actively searching for a provider the moment a problem appears.
The reality is far more layered.
Many customers are still trying to determine whether the problem is important enough to solve right now.
Others are trying to decide whether change is worth the disruption.
Some are trying to determine which solution path even makes sense.
Others are weighing the risk of making the wrong decision in front of leadership, customers, employees, or stakeholders.
Most industries now feel crowded with alternatives that sound increasingly similar on the surface.
Messaging across competitors often blends.
AI-generated content has accelerated the amount of information available while making it harder to quickly distinguish between sources.
Research from Demandbase’s 2025 B2B Buyer Report highlights information overload and decision paralysis as growing challenges for buyers navigating vendor content, analyst reports, peer reviews, recommendations, and AI-generated information.
Many businesses still assume customers are moving steadily toward a purchase decision.
While a large portion of buyers are still trying to make sense of the problem itself, that uncertainty creates contradictions that businesses need to appreciate more deeply.
Customers are balancing competing priorities, pressures, expectations, timelines, and risks all at once.
The challenge today is no longer access to information.
The challenge is helping customers make sense of too much information.
Traditional personas rarely account for uncertainty, hesitation, conflicting motivations, changing priorities, or decision fatigue.
That gap becomes increasingly important as customer journeys grow more layered and difficult to navigate.
Still, this doesn’t mean that personas are not useful. It likely means you need to be more intentional about your customer research.
Why Granular Understanding Matters More Than Ever
Generalized customer understanding becomes far less effective once markets become crowded with similar products, similar messaging, and endless alternatives competing for attention.
Customers increasingly expect businesses to understand the context surrounding their decisions, not just the category they belong to.
Research continues to show that B2B buyers expect more personalized communication and vendor understanding that are directly tied to their business context.
Buying groups are also becoming larger and more fragmented, which means different stakeholders often evaluate the same purchase through completely different priorities.
I’m guessing that your research doesn’t capture any of the above, so it is likely to find its way into a persona.
The visual below reflects a framework I often use when thinking about decision-shaping moments throughout the customer journey.
Customers are not simply moving through a linear funnel.
Different questions, hesitations, motivations, and confidence signals emerge at different stages.
- A customer in the research stage often needs clarity and confidence-building.
- A customer in the evaluation stage may need reassurance around risk, implementation, or operational impact.
- A customer nearing a final decision may need internal validation and support from multiple stakeholders.
- After purchase, a customer may still need reassurance that they made the right choice.
Those details often remain invisible inside broad segmentation models.
Effective customer understanding requires more than collecting information.
It requires appreciating the details shaping decisions over time.
Customers Do Not Move Through Decisions in Straight Lines
One reason simplistic personas struggle today is that customer journeys rarely follow predictable paths anymore.
Customers revisit concerns repeatedly.
Research happens in cycles.
Confidence builds gradually.
Priorities shift depending on timing, new information, leadership conversations, budget realities, operational pressure, and outside influence.
Many businesses still build customer journeys as though people move neatly from awareness to consideration to purchase in a straight line.
Real decision-making feels far messier than that.
Someone may feel ready to move forward one week and hesitate the next after a stakeholder raises concerns. A buyer may spend weeks researching solutions, pause the process entirely, then revisit it months later after priorities shift internally.
Another customer may appear highly engaged externally, yet lack the internal confidence needed to move forward.
Those moments matter.
That is part of the reason I often think about customer journeys through the lens of decision-shaping.
At different stages, customers need different forms of support.
- Awareness may require helping someone clearly recognize a problem.
- Research often requires educational content, reassurance, and confidence-building.
- Evaluation may require addressing hesitation, implementation concerns, or operational risk.
- Consideration may require helping stakeholders justify a decision internally.
- Post-purchase validation may require reinforcing confidence and helping customers feel successful in their choice.
- Loyalty often develops through consistency, responsiveness, and continued value over time.
Many businesses focus heavily on attracting customers while overlooking the importance of these decision-shaping moments throughout the journey. Traditional personas rarely account for emotional risk, implementation anxiety, organizational maturity, internal politics, or the fear customers feel around making the wrong decision publicly.
Those factors shape behaviour far more than many businesses realize.
That complexity does not make personas irrelevant.
It makes deeper customer understanding more important.
Don’t be mad at personas. Regardless of whether you have them as part of your decision-making support, you still need to understand how your customers make decisions.
What Useful Personas Actually Look Like Today
Useful personas today are far less about categorizing customers and far more about understanding behaviour.
Strong customer understanding includes: what triggers action, what creates hesitation, what builds confidence, what slows decision-making, what information customers trust, and what trade-offs customers weigh internally.
That type of understanding will always change alongside customers.
Many businesses still treat personas as one-time exercises completed during a strategy session and rarely revisited afterward.
The businesses gaining the strongest insight today are continuously listening.
- They are paying attention to customer conversations.
- They are noticing recurring concerns.
- They are recognizing changing expectations.
- They are identifying where friction appears throughout the journey.
Useful personas are living decision-understanding frameworks that help businesses make smarter decisions internally.
That distinction matters.
A strong persona should help a business answer questions like:
- Why are customers hesitating?
- What type of reassurance matters most?
- What operational pressures are shaping decisions?
- What concerns remain unspoken during sales conversations?
- What creates confidence?
Those insights create far more strategic value than surface-level descriptions ever could.
Personas Were Never The Problem
Personas were never meant to reduce people to neat categories.
They were supposed to help businesses think more intentionally about customers.
The problem was never the existence of personas.
The problem was allowing them to become static, shallow, disconnected from reality, and overly simplified.
Really, stop and think about how much of your marketing budget is dedicated to customer research and intentionally understanding your customer journey?
That is really what you should be thinking about. Not whether personas are useful, but they will only be as useful as the inputs used to create them.
That is on us.
Customers now navigate: more information, more alternatives, more internal pressure, more uncertainty, more stakeholders, more risk. That complexity increases the need for deeper customer understanding.
From my perspective, the businesses that succeed long term will not be the ones abandoning personas entirely. The businesses that succeed will be those willing to stay consistent in how they understand customers. They can document it anyway they like, but the information needs to scale across your organization.
The strongest customer strategies are rarely built from assumptions.
They are built from observation, listening, research, context, nuance, and a willingness to continuously learn.
How We Can Help
At Marketing Mile, we help businesses move beyond surface-level customer profiles to better understand the real pressures, motivations, concerns, and decision-shaping moments influencing customer behaviour.
That understanding helps teams create stronger strategies, clearer messaging, better customer experiences, and more confident business decisions across departments.
