I love Dolly Parton. I can write a whole article about it. But today I’d like to talk about a new meme she’s sparked recently and how it relates to conversation design. Here’s the image that started it all:
This image has spawned thousands upon thousands of other people to follow suit and humorously showcase the different personas we bring to different social media platforms.
Quickly – let me recap – what’s a persona?
A persona is the face everyone shows the world. It’s how we act and react in any given situation. Wally Brill, in his Google lightening talk about designing a persona, states, “Everyone has a unique persona…it’s the who of who you are.” (Check out that video, it’s amazing.)
As you can imagine, a well-designed persona is critical in creating the right brand impression through conversational robots. Think of your conversational robot as your employee that is representing, at scale, what your brand is about.
So, where does this meme come in?
Let’s start with another vibrant personality – Flo from Progressive. She’s enthusiastic, super-duper cheerful, and she’s all smiles! She does a great job at representing Progressive as a light-hearted and contemporary insurance company. This works great for the use case of advertising on television and increasing brand awareness.
But, if someone was in a car accident, and moments later they call Progressive to file a claim… Flo would pretty much be the worst personality you would interact with. This is an extreme example, but it illustrates how, even if an entity represents your brand authentically in one use case, when the use case changes, we need the entity to present a different persona.
The further point I’d like to make, is that many brands understand this, but then they feel it necessary to invest a ton of resources to build a different entity for each use case. This is not necessarily the case.
This is where the meme comes in – it illustrates how all of us live everyday with different personas. Dolly Parton has a LinkedIn persona, as well as a Tinder persona. Different personas can represent the same person. I wouldn’t recommend putting your Tinder photo on LinkedIn*, but just remember that we don’t need to create an entirely different backstory and identity per use case.
In summary – It is absolutely critical to keep in mind that different use cases necessitate different personas, but it doesn’t necessitate the creation of entirely different entities.
*There are always exceptions:
