Buyer Persona, Buyer Profile, Buyer Center: What is what?

Buyer Persona

A Buyer Persona, whether B2B or B2C, is the personification of your ideal customer. From a large pool of data, including surveys and market analyses, we create a prototypical person - the buyer persona, whose financial situation, motivations, pain points, worries, wishes, challenges and goals match those of your target group. The result is a person(a) with a name, face and place of residence that does not exist in real life, but could exist in exactly the same way and represents your ideal customers. Data-based.

Buyer profile

A buyer profile, in contrast, is a much more vague, general description of the characteristics and attributes of a target group or potential customers. It can include demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics, but without specific details or an individual identity. A Buyer Profile provides a rough idea of who the potential customers might be, without going into specifics about individuals. Reasons for purchase, pain points, etc. remain obscure.
However, a Buyer Profile can also describe a company, namely in the B2B area a desired company with which your company would like to do business. The profile maps companies roughly with size, industry, turnover and location that are looking for solutions that your company offers.

Buyer Center

A buyer center describes several B2B personas who are involved in the buying process of a product or service. Unlike B2C customers, who alone decide what they want or need and then make the purchase or use a service, B2B customers always involve several people or even several departments: Initiators, influencers, decision-makers and users.
Let's say logistics needs new software to make warehouse management more efficient. Then the warehouse staff will know exactly where the old software is stuck. They are the initiators. The purchasing department then recognizes, for example, that improved warehouse management could lead to cost savings and more efficient procurement. The people there are then influencers. The logistics department manager will work with the IT department or the external service provider to create a requirements profile (other influencers). This will then be reviewed by management to decide whether to release the budget for it. These would be the decision makers. Depending on the company structure, other people may also be involved, e.g. from the finance department or sales. Users would again be the employees in logistics and possibly also in purchasing. All together they represent the Buyer Center.

The complexity of the buyer center is the reason why several personas are often necessary, especially in B2B. Who exactly these personas are, how they relate to each other, and how they interact and make decisions together is what we put together for our customers in the "Persona Playbook". Such a playbook contains several persona-sedcards of the personas at each point in the company or in the process of the purchase decision: Initiators, Decision Makers, etc.

In the B2C area, you don't need so much effort. Here it is enough to cover the main target group(s) with one or a few persona(s). Here, the most important thing is that these personas are data-based and very precise. So that you play out exactly the right message on exactly the right channel at the perfect time and don't lose any budget due to wastage.