Quantitative vs. qualitative personas: who wins?

The challenge: When numbers are not enough

A large IT company (NDA) was faced with the challenge of recruiting more qualified specialists for open developer positions. Despite attractive salaries and a modern working environment, the number of applicants fell short of expectations - especially among women and young professionals. To counteract this, the recruiting team initially decided to conduct a quantitative analysis based on online surveys of current employees, evaluations from the applicant management system and traffic data from career websites and job portals. The result: most applications came from men aged between 28 and 35 with more than five years of professional experience. Women made up less than 15% of applicants. In order to better understand the causes, the company supplemented the approach with qualitative in-depth interviews with applicants who had not applied, even though they would have been suitable according to their profile. New employees were also interviewed in the first few weeks after joining the company. Many female tech talents had the feeling that they were "not meant" on the career site - the imagery, language and role examples seemed male-dominated. Career starters, on the other hand, felt put off by the high requirements and the lack of insight into everyday working life. With these new findings, the company was able to use existing candidate personasoptimize the career page, reformulate job advertisements and create a "day-in-the-life" video format with real junior developers for social media.

The practical example shows how important it is to understand quantitative and qualitative data as a unit. The goal: to understand how people act and why.  

Quantitative personas: data for strategic decisions

Quantitative personas are based on structured data that companies collect using online surveys, web analytics, CRM data, social media insights or tracking tools. The resulting user segments can be measured in figures and can be analyzed along typical dimensions such as age, device type, usage intensity or purchasing behaviour. Statistical cluster analyses or segmentation models are used to create target group segments or personas that represent the majority of a target group.

Thanks to their wide-ranging database, quantitative personas are considered to be particularly representative and objective. Companies receive reliable statements about behavioral patterns and can derive valid business decisions from them. However, numbers alone say nothing about people's backgrounds, fears or needs. There is also an increased risk of reducing target groups to stereotypical patterns. As the example described above shows, the use of purely quantitative data can lead to aspects that are crucial to success remaining unseen. Qualitative personas close this knowledge gap.

Qualitative personas: for a better understanding of human nature

Qualitative persona profiles are based on information that emerges from personal conversations or observations of representatives of a target group. Typical methods for collecting qualitative data include in-depth interviews, focus groups, contextual observations or diary studies. The focus of a qualitative analysis is to understand people's motivations, emotions and attitudes in depth. For example, qualitative methods show how people experience certain situations and what emotions they feel. Companies can use these findings to map and optimize customer and candidate journeys in detail. Qualitative methods also make it easier to take into account the social and cultural context in which target groups operate. This is because instead of sober statistics, narratives are created that make the people behind the behavior visible. The main advantage of this approach is therefore its empathic strength. Instead of simply understanding what people do, qualitatively motivated personas answer the question of what thoughts and patterns of action motivate them. This leads to new impulses and can help to critically question existing assumptions. However, the implementation of qualitative market research methods is usually associated with considerable effort and high costs. Furthermore, the data collected is more prone to error and is not always representative of the entire target group.

Quantitative vs. qualitative personas: a comparison

The solution: personas from quantitative and qualitative data

The comparison shows: Neither exclusively quantitative nor qualitative personas lead to a satisfactory result in most cases. Because the fact is: regardless of whether B2C companies want to address customers, B2B service providers want to address the buyer center or recruiters want to address suitable candidates: It is almost always necessary to understand how and why people behave in a certain way.

For personas to really work in practice, companies therefore need a holistic persona strategy that takes both quantitative and qualitative data into account. By combining quantitative and qualitative personas, companies obtain a realistic picture of the target group with depth and reach. - with depth and reach. While qualitative data helps to develop empathy for the relevant target groups and understand their true needs and emotions, quantitative data provides the necessary statistics and scaling to transfer and strategically validate these findings.

Conclusion: Success with a holistic persona strategy

The mix of quantitative and qualitative personas creates a link between intuition and evidence, between creative exploration and analytical control - for data-driven personas that really work.

Would you like to develop or optimize data-based buyer, candidate or employee personas? We would be happy to advise you in a non-binding introductory meeting.