While it looks like strategy on a page, in reality, the confidence level behind it is often about as solid as saying people who go to the gym don’t eat sugar.

Now, before the pitchforks come out … personas aren’t inherently bad. There is also a particular industry/segment of consumers where brand/buyer persona actually makes a lot of sense on a strategic level. I’ll cover that in the next post as Part 2.

My point is: Most teams start with personas. But it rarely tells you anything useful about how a market actually behaves. It often sends the entire process in the wrong direction.

The first job of strategy is understanding how the market is structured.

This is segmentation. Not personas. Ritson is very clear on this.

Segmentation tells you:

As Les Binet and Ehrenberg-Bass research show, brand growth usually comes from reaching more category buyers, not narrowing the audience too aggressively.

So segmentation answers a business question:

Where is the money?

Once the market is understood, the next step is identifying Category Entry Points.

CEPs explain when people enter the category. They are the moments when demand appears.

For example, in my own work, the CEPs are very clear.

Companies usually come to me when:

None of these situations have anything to do with a demographic persona.

They are buying moments.

And those moments matter far more than someone’s favourite coffee.

Once you know the moment, you need to understand the job behind it.

This is where Jobs To Be Done becomes useful.

JTBD focuses on what the buyer is trying to accomplish. Not who they are.

For example, when a leadership team hires a brand strategist, the job is rarely just “create a brand strategy”.

The real job is something deeper.

Often it looks like this:

Functional job
→ build a brand foundation to align marketing

Emotional job
→ remove uncertainty and internal debate

Social job
→ signal competence and direction inside the organisation

Understanding that job is far more useful than knowing whether the buyer runs marathons (unless I sell running shoes:)).

Once you understand the job, you can examine brand alternatives.

April Dunford’s positioning framework is very straightforward: buyers always compare solutions against alternatives.

But those alternatives are not always obvious competitors.

Sometimes the real alternatives are, let’s look at my example again:

Understanding those alternatives defines the competitive frame. Without that frame, positioning becomes vague. Positioning is about being more of what matters to your customer, and what the alternatives offer.

Only after the market, the moment, the job, and the alternatives are understood do brand attributes become meaningful.

Attributes are the signals that tell buyers why your brand is the right choice. This is when they check if you as a brand can provide what is important to them (that can be functional, emotional)

For me, the attributes I consistently hear from clients are:

So, in reality. If you are a business, and you like working with someone who walks in wearing a suit, all serious, and you read about me as listed above, there is a chance you're gonna want to explore alternatives that will bring you the experience that you prefer/value more.

These are not labels to boost the ego.

They are signals that help the brand become meaningful and different in the mind of the buyer. Exactly the combination Kantar research shows drives brand growth.

Personas collapse all of this complexity into a fictional individual.

They describe the person. Often described through the lens of internal stakeholders. Internal people are not the consumer. No matter how much time we spend marketing our brand. Only the consumer is the consumer.

Strategy needs to explain the market, the moment, and the motivation.

Which is why personas often produce a lot of effort for very little strategic return.

They look good in a deck. But they rarely help answer the questions that actually drive growth.

The next time you start a strategy project, resist the urge to open a persona template.

Instead ask:

Answer those questions well, and you’ll know far more than Susan ever could.

Strategy is about understanding markets and what will move the business forward.