In a nutshell: Buyer personas are semi-fictitious profiles with no peer-reviewed empirical validation whatsoever. Decades of research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute demonstrate that any brand's customers are extremely heterogeneous and that competing brands share surprisingly similar audiences (Duplication of Purchase Law). Narrow psychographic targeting reaches only 50% of the desired audience, halving ROI. Real growth comes from acquiring light buyers — who make up over 80% of the customer base — through broad reach, distinctive brand assets, and mental/physical availability.
There is a ritual that repeats itself every day in Italian marketing agencies. The consultant opens their nice Word document, types "Buyer Persona" as the title, and begins to invent profiles of imaginary customers. "Maria, 35, working mother, yoga enthusiast, reads vegan cooking blogs, earns 42,000 euros a year." An inner round of applause follows. The document is presented to the client with the gravity of someone delivering a treasure map. The client nods, pays the invoice, and nobody ever asks: does this actually work?
At Deep Marketing, an evidence-based communication and marketing agency with offices in Verona and Prague, we have a clear answer: no, it does not work. And we are not saying this to be contrarian or provocative. We are saying it because decades of academic research in marketing science demonstrate, with data in hand, that buyer personas are a pseudoscientific tool that at best is useless, and at worst actively harmful to SMEs. Especially Italian ones, which have limited budgets and zero margin for error.
Brace yourselves. This article will demolish one of contemporary marketing's sacred cows. And it will give you something much more solid in its place.
What buyer personas are (and why they are so popular)
Buyer personas are semi-fictitious profiles of a company's "ideal customer." They include demographic information (age, income, location), psychographic data (values, interests, lifestyle), behavioral patterns (purchase habits, preferred channels), and often a made-up name, a stock photo, and a romanticized biography.
The concept was popularized by Alan Cooper in the 1990s for software design, then imported into marketing by HubSpot and others during the inbound marketing boom. The underlying idea is simple and seductive: if you know your ideal customer inside out, you can create perfectly calibrated messages for them.
Why are they so popular? For three reasons:
- They give the illusion of control. In a chaotic world, having a precise profile of "who our customer is" provides reassurance. It reduces decision anxiety.
- They are easy to create. No data needed, no research required. A brainstorming session, some intuition, and a handful of sample interviews are enough.
- They are sellable. For an agency, presenting three buyer personas with a first name, last name, and photo is a tangible deliverable. The client sees something, so they think they have received value.
The problem? This simplicity is exactly what makes them dangerous. And science has something to say about this.
The problem: science says they don't work
Marketing is one of the few disciplines where practitioners systematically ignore the scientific literature. If a doctor prescribed treatments based on intuition rather than clinical evidence, they would lose their license. In marketing, however, tools with no empirical validation become "best practices" repeated in every course, blog, and webinar.
Buyer personas are the textbook case. There is not a single peer-reviewed study demonstrating their effectiveness in improving marketing results. Not one. On the contrary, decades of research dismantle their fundamental assumptions.
Elinor Riebe, in her 2011 study published in the Journal of Marketing Communications, analyzed the impact of media fragmentation on audience targeting, demonstrating that attempts at precise buyer profiling lead to inferior results compared to broader approaches (Riebe, 2011). Jenni Romaniuk, a researcher at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, demonstrated as early as 2007 that psychographic and attitudinal segmentation does not produce the expected results in real campaigns (Romaniuk, 2007).
But the point is not a single study. It is an entire body of evidence converging on an uncomfortable conclusion: the assumptions on which buyer personas are based are false.
The 5 structural flaws of buyer personas (with data)
1. They project stereotypes, not reality
When a marketing team sits down to create buyer personas, what actually happens? People project their own biases, stereotypes, and mental models onto profiles that are supposed to represent the customer. "Our typical customer is a quality-conscious professional" — translated: "we believe we are a premium brand and we want our customer to confirm it."
As research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated, humans are terrible at describing other people's behavior without projecting their own. This phenomenon, known as the false consensus effect, causes buyer personas to become mirrors of the company, not windows onto real customers.
2. They ignore target heterogeneity
Here is the data point that should make every buyer persona advocate tremble: any brand's customers are incredibly heterogeneous. There is no "typical customer." This is one of the most robust empirical laws in marketing, confirmed by researchers like Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Your customer is not "Maria, 35, yoga and vegan cooking." Your customer is a chaotic and unpredictable mix of people with radically different ages, incomes, interests, and motivations. Creating 3-5 profiles and pretending they represent this complexity is like describing the ocean with 3 glasses of water.
3. They trivialize the variability of human behavior
Buyer personas assume that people behave consistently and predictably. But research by Dekimpe and colleagues (1997) has shown that rational, systematic evaluation is the exception among consumers, not the norm. People buy out of habit, on impulse, based on product availability, due to situational factors. The idea that "Maria" follows a linear, predictable decision-making journey is a fantasy.
Worse still: the same person behaves differently at different times. Light buyers — who represent over 80% of any brand's customer base — purchase sporadically, infrequently, and often seemingly at random. Buyer personas, by definition, exclude them.
4. They exclude the majority of customers (light buyers)
This is perhaps the most costly error. Buyer personas, by focusing on "ideal customers" (typically loyal heavy buyers), systematically ignore light buyers. Yet light buyers — occasional, infrequent purchasers who buy from many different brands — make up the vast majority of the customer base and are the key to growth.
Every evidence-based marketer knows this: growth does not come from retaining already loyal customers (Double Jeopardy makes this nearly impossible), but from acquiring new light buyers. And light buyers, by definition, do not match any predefined profile. If your targeting excludes them, you are literally closing the door to growth.
5. They lead to wasted budget by excluding potential customers
The practical consequence of all this is devastating for SMEs. When a company with a limited budget builds campaigns around buyer personas, it artificially narrows its audience. It invests all its budget to reach a narrow segment that matches the invented profile, excluding a large portion of potential category buyers.
Wood (2009), in his study on the short-term effects of advertising published in the Journal of Advertising Research, and Riebe (2011) showed how narrow psychographic targeting produces inferior results compared to broad targeting. On average, only half the audience reached through psychographic targeting actually matches the desired profile. You are paying to reach 100 people, but only 50 match your profile. ROI halved from the start.
The myth of "different audiences" across brands (debunked by science)
There is an implicit assumption in buyer personas that is rarely questioned: the idea that your brand's customers are fundamentally different from those of your competitors. "Our customers are more sophisticated," "our target is different from brand X's," "we cater to a premium audience."
Research says the exact opposite. Decades of empirical studies — Hammond (1996), Kennedy (2000), Uncles (2012), Anesbury (2017) — have demonstrated that competing brands in the same category share surprisingly similar audiences. It is the Duplication of Purchase law: Coca-Cola and Pepsi customers overlap massively. Nike and Adidas customers are nearly the same. The clients of your accounting firm and those of your competitor have virtually identical demographic and behavioral profiles.
The differences between competing brands' audiences are much smaller than marketers and entrepreneurs believe. This means that creating "unique" buyer personas for your brand is an exercise in self-deception: you are looking for differences that in reality do not exist, or exist to a negligible degree.
If audiences are similar, then the competition is not about "who knows their target better," but about who reaches more people within the category with greater frequency and more effective creative assets. Buyer personas become, in this context, a costly distraction.
What to use instead: evidence-based targeting
Dismantling buyer personas is easy. The hard question is: what do we replace them with? The answer is not "nothing." The answer is a targeting approach founded on what actually works, not on what "seems logical."
The evidence-based approach to targeting is built on principles that have emerged from decades of empirical research:
- Broad targeting of category buyers. The only segmentation that is truly useful for most SMEs is the obvious, broad, and functional one: identifying people who buy (or might buy) in your product/service category. You don't need to know if they do yoga or read vegan blogs. You need to know if they buy shoes, if they are looking for an accountant, if they need an IT service.
- Maximize reach. Instead of concentrating the budget on a narrow segment, distribute it to reach the largest possible number of category buyers. Light buyers are out there, and they are your growth engine.
- Distinctive brand assets. Instead of personalizing messages for imaginary buyer personas, invest in creating distinctive brand assets (colors, logos, jingles, taglines, visual styles) that make your brand immediately recognizable and memorable to everyone.
- Variants and broad product range. Instead of betting on one product "perfect for Maria," offer the broadest possible range. Variety naturally captures customer heterogeneity without needing to profile them.
- Mental and physical availability. The real driver of sales is not targeting precision, but how easily the customer thinks of your brand (mental availability) and how easily they can buy it (physical availability).
Buyer personas vs. evidence-based targeting: the comparison
To make the contrast even clearer, here is a comparison table that puts the two approaches side by side across all key dimensions.
Targeting approaches: when they work and when they don't
Not all targeting is useless. The question is not "to target or not to target," but which type of targeting produces real results. Here is an evidence-based guide.
The niche myth: a semantic disaster that costs dearly
Let us open a fundamental parenthesis, because this mistake has devastated Italian SMEs. When American gurus talk about "niche," they mean a large but specific market segment. When the Italian entrepreneur hears "niche," they think of a microscopic sub-segment.
This semantic confusion has produced an entire generation of SMEs that voluntarily confined themselves to tiny markets, convinced that "riches are in niches." They created ultra-specific buyer personas, hyper-targeted campaigns, messages for audiences of just a few thousand people. And then they wondered why they weren't growing.
The result? Advertising budgets burned to reach market slices too small to sustain growth. And the structural impossibility of reaching those light buyers who, as we have seen, represent 80%+ of the potential customer base.
Buyer personas and the niche myth are two sides of the same coin: the illusion that narrowing the audience improves results. Science says the opposite.
How to apply proper targeting in 2026
Let's get practical. If tomorrow morning you want to stop using buyer personas and start doing evidence-based targeting, here are the concrete steps.
1. Define your purchase category (not your "ideal customer")
Stop asking "who is our typical customer?" and start asking "who buys in our category?". If you sell shoes, your target is people who buy shoes. If you offer accounting services, your target is businesses and professionals who need an accountant. Sounds obvious? It is. And it works infinitely better than buyer personas.
2. Maximize reach, not precision
Every euro of your budget should reach the largest possible number of category buyers. Use the obvious demographic and geographic filters (don't sell diapers to people without children, don't advertise your Verona restaurant in Rome). But stop there. Don't narrow further by psychographic interests or behavioral profiles. Your next customer looks nothing like your current customer.
3. Invest in distinctive brand assets
Instead of personalizing messages for fictitious personas, invest in the creation and reinforcement of your distinctive brand assets. A recognizable color, a memorable logo, a consistent tone of voice, a tagline that sticks in memory. These assets work for all your potential customers, not just "Maria."
4. Offer variety
If your product/service allows it, expand the range. Don't look for the perfect product for one segment, but a family of products that naturally captures the diversity of your buyers. It works, it's proven, and it requires no profiling.
5. Measure what truly matters
Don't measure how many "Marias" you reached. Measure market penetration (how many category buyers know your brand), mental availability (in how many purchase situations your brand comes to mind), and physical availability (how easy it is to find and buy your product). These are the real predictors of growth.
FAQ: the uncomfortable questions about buyer personas
Don't buyer personas at least help align the internal team?
This is the most common argument in their defense, and the most insidious. Yes, having a shared understanding of the market is important. No, buyer personas are not the right way to achieve it. Align the team on the purchase category, on real market data, on the empirical laws of marketing. Creating fictitious profiles to "get aligned" is like tuning an orchestra to the wrong note: everyone will play together, but out of tune.
But I created buyer personas and my campaigns worked!
Correlation is not causation. Your campaigns worked despite the buyer personas, not because of them. If the message was good and the budget sufficient, they would have worked without the profiling too. In fact, they would probably have worked better with broader targeting, because you would have also reached the light buyers that personas exclude.
Isn't evidence-based targeting too generic?
This is the classic objection, and it stems from a misunderstanding. Broad targeting does not mean generic targeting. It means reaching all category buyers with a message that leverages consistent distinctive brand assets. The specificity is not in the audience (which should be broad) but in the brand (which must be unmistakable).
Big companies use buyer personas, so they must work!
Big companies do many things out of bureaucratic inertia, not because they work. Many cutting-edge multinationals — especially those that work with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Mars, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola) — have already abandoned buyer personas in favor of evidence-based approaches. SMEs that copy them are importing the flaws of large corporations without having the resources to compensate for them.
How do I create content without knowing who my audience is?
You do know who your audience is: they are the people who buy in your category. Create content that makes your brand memorable and recognizable to them. You don't need to know if "Maria" does yoga to write a good ad. You need to understand which Category Entry Points (situations that trigger the purchase need) your brand must be present in within the consumer's mind.
Are buyer personas completely useless? Isn't there even one case where they help?
In UX design for specific software, where the interface must adapt to well-defined user roles (admin, editor, viewer), "personas" have a limited operational purpose. In strategic marketing? No. The assumptions they are based on are falsified by empirical evidence. Using them means building strategy on demonstrably false foundations.
Conclusion: stop inventing imaginary customers
Buyer personas are the fidget spinner of marketing: everyone had one, nobody knew exactly what it was for, and now it is in the drawer of embarrassing memories. With the difference that a fidget spinner cost 5 euros, while buyer personas can cost your company thousands of euros in wasted budget and missed opportunities.
Marketing science has spoken, and the verdict is clear. Customers are heterogeneous, competing brands' audiences are similar, light buyers are the engine of growth, and narrow psychographic targeting does not work. Buyer personas violate every one of these empirical principles.
At Deep Marketing, we do not use buyer personas. We use data, evidence, and the empirical laws of marketing. And the results of our clients — from Genertel to the Milan Cathedral, from MIDATicket to PT Torino — speak for themselves.
If you are tired of paying agencies that sell you profiles of imaginary customers and you want a strategy based on what actually works, let's talk. It is time to do marketing the right way.
Sources and References
- Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science — About Us
- Ehrenberg, Goodhardt & Barwise — Double Jeopardy Revisited, Journal of Marketing (1990)
- Romaniuk & Sharp — How Brands Grow Part 2, Oxford University Press (2016/2022)
- Trinh, Dawes & Sharp — Where is the Brand Growth Potential? An Examination of Buyer Groups, Marketing Letters (2023)
- Wikipedia — The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science
- Sharp, B. — How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know, Oxford University Press (2010)
- Wikipedia — Double Jeopardy (marketing)
