Marketing With Purpose Kit: Purpose-Led Customer Personas

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:15)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast series, Marketing With Purpose, our short format series where we explore how to create meaningful growth by embedding purpose into your brand's marketing strategy. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski. Hey, guys.

**Mike Liwski** (0:34)
Hey, Stephen.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:35)
Nice to see you again.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:37)
We are back. So today, we are talking about a critical shift in modern marketing. Purpose-led customer personas. Why we need to move beyond segments like age or income and focus instead on shared values, emotional drivers, and deeper resonance. And we've been knee-deep in this for a while with development of our AICMO product. Check it out at aicmo.io.
But yeah, we're knee-deep in this. Mike, kick us off here.

**Mike Liwski** (1:09)
Yeah, I will. And I think what's key about this is there's a problem that exists today with buyer personas, right? Most marketers, they built personas based on some of those surface traits, as you mentioned, like the age, gender, maybe job profile, and even, you know, geos, like locations. And while that is important and that helps, it's barely starting to scratch the surface when it comes to building a good persona.

**Tullio Siragusa** (1:39)
You know what's sad when you think about how it's been done historically? We've pushed this cloning process where everyone in that area in that, you know, is that kind of person, right? So we've created this cloning idea of what people who live in certain areas are like. But the reality is that, you know, you may know that your customer is a 38 year old VP of Marketing living in Denver. Maybe they live in a particular area of Denver. But what does that really tell you about what moves them? You know, what does what inspires them? What do they believe in that that psychographic data is not going to tell you what makes that person sort of tick?

**Stephen Sakach** (2:20)
Yeah, and we know the challenge, here's the challenge. It's if your marketing is built on just demographics, your messaging is just going to feel generic, right? So to truly connect, you need to know what your customers value, what problems they care about solving, and how your purpose aligns with theirs. So you've got to dive in a little deeper than kind of just the standard demographics that you typically find in a Google interface or something like that when you're working.

**Mike Liwski** (2:54)
Yeah. So then what is it that we want our clients to do, or our listeners to do with their personas? Really, it's to build that purpose-led persona, one that goes deeper.
For example, it'll ask some tougher questions, right? For example, what emotional need is the audience or this person trying to fulfill, right? A great tool for that is using an empathy map, right? Because then they can really understand what are they seeing, what are they thinking, feeling, saying, what are they talking about? So that's number one is, what is that emotional need that this person has? Then from there, what values do they really prioritize in the brands that they support, right? What values do they prize? And then from there, what is their personal or professional mission in life? So that those two things can align. And then how does your brand help them support what they're trying to achieve in their life?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:58)
And this is much easier to do today, because people live more openly, they're share themselves more openly. So it's easier to get to this information. So let's think of an example. So instead of Sophie is a 42 year old VP of HR, that's nice. We don't really know anything about Sophie, other than she's 42 and she's a VP of HR. A customer led persona might be or sound more like Sophie is a bridge builder. She cares deeply about equity in the workplace and wants to have a legacy of human-centered leadership. She's frustrated by bureaucracy and loves tools that empower her team, not just manage them. Now we've got a story about what Sophie cares about, not just who she is.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:47)
Yeah. And just defining that, you notice how it opens up new kinds of messaging, the tone, the content, even your product features. So it's about speaking to her story, not just those stats. Suddenly you've got a much better jumping off point.

**Tullio Siragusa** (5:02)
Exactly. And now, so the big question again is, as we do with all these shows, is how do you build this? How do you do this? Right? So how do you build purpose-led personas? Well, you create these richer, more resident personas by first listening for emotional clues, right? Go beyond surveys and start interviewing your best customers. That's be empath, be curious. It starts with curiosity. And empathetic, understanding what matters to them.