When you’re immersed in your brand on a day to day basis, it can be hard to have perspective. The late author David Foster Wallace talked about the story of the old fish who says to two young fish, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

He adds, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

When faced with large-scale, ambitious branding challenges, it might be tempting to go straight to the ideation and execution part of the work. But a crucial first step in solving the challenge is stepping outside of the ocean of your brand to enter into your consumer’s world and see things through their eyes.

Crafting a persona allows you to more deeply understand their pain points, desires, and what motivates them above all. Only then, when you have your finger on the pulse of what’s most relevant to your consumer, can you confidently create bold, game-changing marketing and campaigns that will grow your brand’s impact.

BBMG recently partnered with the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) to grow consumer awareness in North America, drive relevance and inspire more consumers to join them in their mission to transform the sustainable seafood industry by choosing brands that meet their rigorous, science-based standards for wild-caught seafood. As an organization with science and measurement at its core, data is paramount to the organization, as you can imagine, so having an evidence-based consumer persona to guide our creative development helped embolden our thinking and gave our clients confidence to say, yes! to creative approaches that felt different for the MSC brand.

Listen With Empathy

In order to launch a successful campaign, before we could dive into storytelling we had to first be scientists ourselves — human scientists who listened with empathy to more deeply understand the needs of our target consumers.

While our goal was to drive awareness of the MSC and fuel a culture of sustainable living, our qualitative research and a quantitative study by GlobeScan revealed that, while sustainability is important, our target consumer has a lot of considerations to weigh — especially when she’s standing in the grocery aisle. With this in mind, we crafted a persona who accurately brought her priorities to life. She’s a young mom with a four-year old, her schedule is packed to the brim so she tag-teams cooking duties with her husband. She tries to cook unique, Pinterest-worthy recipes but more often than not she’s in the grocery aisle looking for something easy, safe and healthy for her family. With so many options, she can often feel overwhelmed by making the right choice and feels like she has to compromise.

Our persona helped us explore how we might shift our messaging to speak directly to our consumers’ most pressing needs. Needs like maintaining a healthy diet while still eating well, and ensuring what they’re feeding their family is safe and delicious.

Strengthen With Data-Driven Insights

With research-backed clarity on MSC’s target customers’ true needs and desires, we didn’t stop there. Like any good scientist, we needed to test our hypothesis in the field and understand where we might reach them and what they care about.

Through ad performance testing on digital channels, we were able to hone our message and uncover what channels they are most active on, what causes they care about and what brands they typically support. Strengthening your persona with market insights helps to create a strategic marketing plan so your brand can truly show up at the right place, at the right time to build brand relevance and love.

Execute With Confidence

Developing a persona before diving into campaign creation allowed us to bring her needs and priorities to the forefront throughout the design process. Bolstered by strategic insights, we were able to make bold choices that would break through in the market and activate across platforms that we felt confident would reach our target consumer.

But perhaps most importantly, our persona-led approach created a sense of true partnership with our client. We equipped the MSC with the tools to succeed — even beyond the duration of the campaign. This was a big opportunity for our client, and they were able to seize the moment, stand confidently behind the work, and get buy-in (and enthusiasm!) from key stakeholders across the organization. Even in the face of the biggest challenges, with a data-driven persona and market insights in hand, the path to impact becomes much more clear.

For more on our work with the Marine Stewardship Council, click here