Ah, “personas chinos.” That phrase still makes me chuckle a bit, and also sigh. I remember when I first really had to dive into that. It wasn’t for some big, fancy global company, mind you. It was for this small startup I was working at a few years back. The boss, let’s call him Mike, he got it into his head that we were going to crack the Chinese market. Just like that. And his big idea? “We need personas chinos! Go figure ’em out!”
So, there I was, tasked with creating these “personas chinos.” My first move, like probably anyone’s, was to hit the internet. And what did I find? A whole lot of nothing, or worse, these super generic profiles. You know the type:
- Always online, super tech-savvy.
- Loves red and gold.
- Values family above all else (okay, this one’s probably true for many, but it’s how they use it that gets me).
- Driven by discounts and group buying.
It felt like reading horoscopes. Vague enough to sound plausible, but ultimately useless for actually building anything meaningful. These “insights” were so surface-level, it was like they were describing a caricature, not actual, breathing human beings. I remember thinking, “Surely, it’s more complicated than this.”
We even tried to design a tiny feature based on this flimsy stuff. Mike was all excited. And, surprise, surprise, it totally bombed. Fell completely flat. No engagement, no interest. Of course, Mike didn’t think his grand strategy was the problem. Nope. It was the “personas.” They weren’t “Chinese enough,” or something like that. He actually said that.
This whole mess reminded me of this one time I tried to cook a really specific regional dish I’d tasted on a trip. I found a recipe online, followed it to the letter. Looked okay, but tasted… off. Just bland and missing something. Later, a friend whose family was actually from that region watched me make it again and just laughed. She pointed out a few tiny things – not about fancy ingredients, but about technique, about why you do certain things in a certain order, stuff the online recipe just glossed over. It was about the context, the little details that make all the difference.
And that’s when it clicked for me with these “personas chinos.” It wasn’t about a checklist of attributes. It was about understanding the story, the context. What’s their day actually like? What are the real, nitty-gritty problems they’re trying to solve? What are their actual aspirations, not the ones a marketing textbook tells you they should have?
So, I kind of scrapped all the generic PowerPoints I’d found. I started trying to find more… real stuff. I spent hours just lurking on forums (the ones I could navigate, anyway), reading blogs, watching those day-in-the-life vlogs – not the flashy influencer kind, but the ones showing someone’s actual commute, their small apartment, what they cooked for dinner. I even managed to chat with a few people through a language exchange thing, not like an interrogation, just casual conversation about their week, their hobbies, what annoyed them. It was slow, painstaking work. I wasn’t looking for “data points” to plug into a spreadsheet. I was trying to get a feel for different narratives.
What I ended up with wasn’t a neat set of five bullet-pointed personas. It was more like a collection of little stories, or “day-in-the-life” sketches. For example, instead of “Young Urban Male, Tech Enthusiast,” it was more like “Xiao Zhang, 28, works as a coder in a big city, lives in a tiny rented room, his main entertainment is mobile games and short videos during his long commute, he’s saving up to visit his parents in his hometown, and he’s super practical about purchases – value for money is key, but he’ll splurge on something that genuinely makes his stressful life easier.” It was less about demographics and more about motivations and daily realities.
Of course, when I tried to explain this more nuanced approach to Mike, his eyes kind of glazed over. He was looking for that simple, easily digestible slide that said, “Target group A: likes X, Y, Z. Solution: offer them X, Y, Z.” The startup? Well, it didn’t make it. Lots of reasons, as is usually the case. But that whole “personas chinos” episode always stuck with me. And even now, I see other companies, big ones too, making those same surface-level assumptions, chasing those generic lists. It’s like they’re all still using that same bad recipe and wondering why the dish doesn’t taste right.
