Setting up your personas and buying contexts.

Each persona has three fields:

• Title — what we'll call the persona in the platform.
• Role (B2B) or Profile (B2C) — who they are. A stable identity that holds across years.
• Buying contexts — short phrases naming the situations that put this persona in market right now. Three per persona.

Most companies need 2-4 personas. Some businesses depend on two distinct audiences: distributors and consumers (insurance, CPG, healthcare), or two sides of a marketplace, network, or platform (retailers and brands on Faire, candidates and employers on a job platform, borrowers and depositors on a lending platform, buyers and sellers on Etsy). When that's true, build parallel persona stacks with at least one persona from each side. Weight them by which side matters more commercially — a lending platform might run three borrower personas alongside one depositor persona; a marketplace might want equal coverage.

Pick your personas

A persona is one of the distinct buying paths into your product — a person whose AI perception you most need to influence. Different buying paths mean different personas; if two candidates share the same triggers and outcomes, they're really one persona. Most companies need two to four.

How to pick

1. List the distinct buying motions you serve. Different reasons someone shows up shopping. A security team renewing SOC2 evidence is a different motion than a CTO standing up compliance for the first time, even if both end up buying the same product.
2. Identify who decides (or recommends, or blocks) in each motion. For B2B, that's a role type (VP of Engineering, Head of Security). For B2C, that's a recognizable identity (late-30s working parents on a high-deductible health plan).
3. Pin them to the kind of organization or household they're in. The combination of role and context is what makes the persona durable across years.
4. Cover the segments that account for the bulk of your revenue or audience. Stop at two to four personas. More than that usually means you've split where you should have combined.

Format

B2B — Title plus a Role line:

Title: The First-Time Compliance Builder
Role: Head of Security at 50-500 person SaaS companies
      pursuing their first SOC2 or ISO 27001

Role is a job type at plural organizations with one or two qualifiers (size, stage, specialty, geography). One sharp qualifier usually works; a second helps if it tightens the persona. Three or more makes it unwieldy.

B2C — Title plus a Profile line:

Title: The HDHP Working Parent
Profile: Late-30s working parents with kids at home,
         covered by a high-deductible health plan

Profile is two or three stable axes that drive buying for your category. Common axes: life stage, household structure, employment status, primary coverage type, geography, relationship to the category. The same person should remain this persona across years.

Strip-the-brand check

Remove your category name and competitor names from the Role or Profile. What's left should still describe a coherent person worth reaching. If it doesn't, the persona is leading the witness — narrowing the research to people already considering you.

• "VP of Engineering at SaaS companies evaluating project-management tools" → leads (names your category). Strip to: "VP of Engineering at 50-500 person SaaS companies."
• "Users of Asana considering alternatives" → narrows research to your existing pipeline. Strip to a durable role.

Worked examples

Vanta (compliance automation) — three distinct buying motions, three personas:

The First-Time Compliance Builder
   Head of Security at 50-500 person SaaS companies
   pursuing their first SOC2 or ISO 27001

The Regulated Mid-Market GRC Lead
   GRC lead at U.S. financial services or healthcare
   firms with 200-5,000 employees

The Enterprise-Ready Security Architect
   VP of Information Security at mid-market companies
   pursuing Fortune 500 customer contracts

Datadog (observability):

The High-Traffic Platform Lead
   Director of Platform Engineering at consumer-facing
   SaaS with seven-figure user counts

The Migration-Stage SRE
   Site Reliability Lead at growing companies migrating
   off self-hosted observability stacks

The Enterprise Observability Architect
   Principal SRE at Fortune 1000 companies running
   heterogeneous cloud infrastructure

Peloton (consumer fitness):

The HDHP Working Parent
   Late-30s working parents with kids at home, dual-income,
   covered by a high-deductible health plan, previously athletic

The Apartment Cardio Seeker
   25-40 year olds in dense urban U.S. metros without practical
   space for traditional equipment, with disposable income

The Post-Pandemic Returner
   35-50 year olds whose pre-COVID fitness habits lapsed
   and who haven't restarted at a gym

Pick your buying contexts

Each persona gets three buying contexts, ordered most-frequent first. A buying context is a short phrase (usually 4 to 10 words) that names the specific moment putting this persona in market right now. This is where most people go wrong.

The big trap: categories vs. situations

A category is a feature of the market that's always true for everyone in the segment. A situation is what changed for a specific buyer this quarter. Categories look plausible. They never put anyone in market.

Vanta:

❌ Categories — always true, trigger nothing:
   SOC2 compliance
   ISO 27001 readiness
   Vendor risk management

✅ Situations — what changed this quarter:
   First SOC2 attempt to unblock an enterprise prospect
   ISO 27001 demand from a new European customer
   Annual audit prep without a dedicated compliance hire

Datadog:

❌ Categories:
   Observability at scale
   APM tooling
   Cloud monitoring

✅ Situations:
   Production incident took six hours to root-cause
   Migrating off Splunk after a cost spike
   Hitting AWS CloudWatch service limits

Peloton:

❌ Categories:
   Home fitness equipment
   Cardio workouts
   Weight loss

✅ Situations:
   Gym membership lapsed and never restarted
   Newborn at home, can't get out to work out
   Doctor flagged a health number at the annual physical

Self-test: if your buying context could appear as a feature on a competitor's website, it's a category. Rewrite it as the moment that made the buyer care this quarter.

Don't lead the witness

The strip-the-brand check applies to buying contexts too. Don't name your category or solution type in the situation. "Annual channel planning kicks off; a marketplace bet is up for review" presupposes the buyer is considering a marketplace — your category. Rewrite as "Annual channel planning kicks off; needs incremental European reach." Same moment, no category framing.

Don't stamp segment labels on the context

If you want enterprise framing, don't write "Enterprise orchestration evaluation." Embed the enterprise signal in role details and trigger specifics: "New CDO standing up centralized data platform" or "Exec mandate to modernize off legacy systems." The research reads enterprise from the situation, not from the label.

Two quick tests

In-market test. After this situation fires, is the persona actually in market for your product? In underwritten categories (insurance, lending, healthcare), the direct event can disqualify them — they're calling their existing provider, not shopping. Use adjacent situations instead: moments where someone close to them was hit. Same urgency, no eligibility issue.

Next-action test. What's the literal next thing they'd do? If it's "call existing provider" or "fight a bill," they aren't shopping yet — move closer to the actual search. Especially watch financial-anxiety situations (deductible spikes, premium increases) for this.

Add your personas to the platform

1. Open your Unusual account and go to Settings → Personas.
2. Click Add new persona.
3. Paste your Title into the Name field.
4. Paste your Role (or Profile) into the Description field.
5. Click Add buyer context and paste each buying context — one per click.
6. Click Create profile.

Tell your Unusual contact when you're done — we kick off the initial research from there. Personas don't need to be perfect on day one; the first round of research will surface refinements.