Organize customer insight around an actual decision, with each interpretation linked to participant evidence and its limits.
Mechanism
A demographic sketch can help identify people but does not explain why they act. Reconstruct the triggering event, options, criteria, concerns and outcome before deciding which message to test.
Source
Buyer Personas (2024), PDF sheets21–37,70–77,85–87 and119–133. The authors distinguish profiles from buying insights and connect quotations to interview sources before aggregation.
Academy application
Define one education buying decision and sample beyond current customers: competitor purchasers, deferrers and people who never considered Academy. Keep exact evidence separate from analyst interpretation. Record contradictory accounts and recruitment gaps. These are proposed study categories, not actual Academy participants.
Boundary
The book's suggestion of about ten initial interviews is a planning heuristic. Recent stories and multiple quotations do not automatically establish unbiased or representative evidence. One person's repeated statements are one source, not several independent observations.
Buyer Personas — Buying Decisions, Evidence and Academy Messaging