Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Brooklyn’s own Sen. Chuck Schumer has embraced personas to help him stay in touch with the needs and concerns of the middle class. A short piece in last week’s New Yorker magazine introduces us to his imaginary family from Long Island:

Schumer says that he is accompanied everywhere he goes by two imaginary middle-class friends, who advise him on all manner of middle-class concerns. Their names, until recently, were Joe and Eileen O’Reilly. “For the book’s sake, we wanted them to be more national,” Schumer said, “so they became the Baileys.” The Baileys live in Massapequa, in Nassau County, …[and] are both forty-five years old: Joe works for an insurance company, Eileen is a part-time employee at a doctor’s office. They worry about terrorism, and about values, and they are patriots—“Joe takes off his cap and sings along with the national anthem before the occasional Islanders game,” Schumer wrote. …It was suggested to Schumer that he is a little bit weird. He acknowledged this to be true. “They’re real for me,” he said. “I love the Baileys.”

Will personas become a trend for ’08 candidates? Will Clinton, Obama, McCain and the rest develop their own personas as they campaign across the country? I can see that they would be a useful tool, particularly effective at enabling politicians to more easily keep “on message” as they tailor their speeches to different demographic groups. And more importantly, personas help us empathize with subjects, whether they be customers, web users or voters. Any tool that helps politicians effectively empathize with the American people can only be a good thing.

Whitney Browne