Persona Portability Test
Enter a new market only when you can learn the audience and adapt your playbook.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 94%
A marketer does not need prior experience with every target persona, but they must be able to understand that audience deeply and change their strategy accordingly. Begin by studying the persona’s needs, objections, behavior, language, trusted relationships, and decision process. Distinguish transferable capabilities such as research, experimentation, channel building, and storytelling from tactics that worked only in a previous market. Enter the role when curiosity and flexibility allow you to develop a new playbook from evidence. Decline it when your approach depends on rigidly reusing the same campaigns regardless of how the new audience evaluates products or shares information.
Origin
Kip Bodner articulated the rule when asked whether a marketer without developer-marketing experience should pursue Flow’s marketing role. Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain.
Core principles
- 01Prior experience with a persona is useful but not always necessary.
- 02Deep audience understanding can make marketing skills portable.
- 03Rigid playbooks fail when audience behavior differs.
- 04Curiosity and adaptability are prerequisites for entering a new market.
How to run it
- 1
Audit your adaptability
Determine whether you normally learn from audiences and experiments or simply rerun a fixed marketing playbook.
Pro tip Review a past situation where evidence changed your strategy.
Watch out Confidence in an old playbook is not evidence of portability.
- 2
Study the persona
Learn the audience’s problems, incentives, skepticism, language, communities, and decision process.
Pro tip Use direct conversations and behavioral evidence together.
Watch out Do not rely solely on generalized persona documents.
- 3
Extract transferable capabilities
Identify which of your skills remain valuable even when specific channels, messages, and conventions change.
Pro tip Favor research, experimentation, and system-building skills.
Watch out Past channel success may depend on conditions absent in the new market.
- 4
Build an adapted playbook
Design tactics around how the new persona discovers, evaluates, trusts, and advocates for products.
Pro tip Start with small experiments that reveal audience behavior.
Watch out Avoid superficial changes to an otherwise unchanged strategy.
- 5
Make the role decision
Proceed if you can commit to deep learning and strategic flexibility; decline if the role requires behavior you will not adopt.
Pro tip Explain the learning plan during the interview.
Watch out Do not conceal a significant unwillingness to engage with the audience.
In the wild
A marketer has never targeted developers but has repeatedly entered unfamiliar markets through customer interviews, community observation, and rapid experimentation. They study developers’ skepticism and peer trust, then propose a community-led distribution plan rather than importing an enterprise lead-generation playbook.
→ The marketer’s transferable learning and building skills compensate for the initial persona gap.
Common mistakes
Reusing a rigid playbook
Assuming that tactics which worked for one audience will automatically work for another ignores different trust and decision mechanisms.
Treating research as a launch phase
Audience understanding must continue as behavior, products, and markets evolve.
Is it for you?
Best for
Marketers considering a role involving a new customer persona or industry.
Not ideal for
Candidates unwilling or unable to conduct sustained audience research and adapt their methods.
From the transcript
“I believe anybody can market to anyone if they understand that persona deeply, they understand what that person needs.”
“I don't think if you are somebody who's rigid and you're like, hey, I have a marketing playbook that I go and run, then don't…”
From the episode
The CMO Show. How to Find One. How to Be One.