The Hedonistic Latte-Matcha Surfer

Someone recently said to me: “You’re a strategist, so you must work a lot with personas.”
My answer was simple: “As little as possible.” Though that deserves a bit of nuance. I don’t think personas are useless, they’re just often misused.

Personas are actually a lot like what happens in theatre. On stage, faces are heavily made up, not to show someone’s true self, but to exaggerate expressions so even the back row can see them. It’s an exaggeration with a purpose: it makes the role clearer, more recognizable, easier to follow.

That’s how personas were born too: caricatures of real people. The New Balance girl, the Oat Milk Elite, the Silver Surfers, or sometimes just “Karens.” Exaggerated stereotypes with catchy names (these days, we even mix in micro-cultures) that make us smile because we instantly recognize them, a defining trait of any caricature. They help make something abstract feel concrete. As an exercise, as a game, as a simplification.

The irony is that we create these characters ourselves, then forget they’re simplifications. What started as a useful exaggeration to make behavior visible suddenly gets treated as a reflection of reality. As if an entire audience could be reduced to one outfit, one attitude, one cliché.

Today, that form of self-deception feels even more convincing because we back it up with data. With enough numbers, you can “prove” anything. You can find correlations, draw clusters, build graphs that look like facts. There’s even a graph showing that the number of Nicolas Cage movies correlates with shark attacks. And that’s how we create the illusion that our personas say more than they actually do.

And that’s where it goes wrong. People are never that straightforward. They change tastes, roles, moods. Spiritual today, cynical tomorrow. Birkenstocks one day, Prada the next. Just as an actor wipes off stage makeup to reveal their real face, we constantly shift and transform.

“That’s why I work with personas as little as possible. They’re useful as long as you keep them light, as a sketch, not a photo. As inspiration, not as law. The moment you confuse them with reality, they close more doors than they open, preventing you from truly understanding your audience.”

With Persona AI, we at Serviceplan Group use personas in a smarter way. No endless workshops with crowds of people (and even more post-its) that always lead to the same archetypal profiles. Thanks to AI, we now create useful profile sketches quickly and efficiently. We identify highlights, attention points, and overarching gains and pains. As inspiration, a starting point for a generic journey, not as an unquestionable truth.

Written by Francesco Caccamese, Strategic Director at Serviceplan Belgium