There are three major factors when it comes to a successful business: Strategy, Innovation, and Marketing. Each topic is worth a book on its own and maybe even each subject as well.

In this blog, we look at the topic that touches upon these three criteria, namely the Persona. What is a persona? The concept of persona comes from the theory of UX design with an attempt to create a profile of the average end users of your product or service.

It is one of the key factors in building a successful business. It is very tempting to view the world from your own paradigms and draw conclusions based on that. With the persona, you step out of this paradigm as much as possible and start to understand what drives your end user. Based on the knowledge you gain, you steer and adjust your organization.

So where to start? You can just do this first based on assumptions and experience purely on what you have seen on site. Are there more men than women? Are they young or old, and so on? Every persona, in my opinion, needs at least the following factors: gender, age, income, level of education, interests or hobbies.

What is the idea behind these factors and what do they tell you:

1. Gender: Men and women vary in how they perceive colors and language. Men are more technology-driven and women by communication and socialization.
2. Age: When it comes to age, this mainly defines the lifestyle someone is in. A student spends time and has interests different from a full-time parent or caretaker. Also, purchasing power most of the time is affected by age. Finally, age also tells a lot about technology understanding; generations grow up with a certain technology and develop a natural understanding of how things work. In the sense of VR, this is crucial to know.
3. Income: Can help you determine the price and presentation of your product or service and if it fits your audience.
4. Level of education: Tells a lot about someone’s intellect as well as most of the time about income.
5. Interests or hobbies: Can be another way of approaching your target group, for example through advertising. It is not unusual that groups have shared interests, think of gaming, sports, places to hang out, etc.

Once you build your persona, the second step is to verify your persona. We want to calibrate and verify the assumptions that we have made. The easiest way to do this is through surveys.

Not all arcades are the same, but I can imagine that when underaged gamers are visiting your venue, it also would be wise to build a persona around the caretaker as well. In the next post, I will share our persona that we created and give some more tips and tricks. 

For now, we hope you have a good starting point for building your persona.