Professional self-blaming is a simple tool for increasing self-awareness and motivation. Since it is a widely spread technique there is a fair chance you are already using it — but probably wrong. Let me show you how to do it right.

When we are facing bad experiences or failure we tend to get said, blame ourselves, loose our self-confidence and complain. There might be some of us, who can see the good side even of the worst stuff, but I am not a big fan of the “positive thinking and the law of attraction” thing. And also… why on earth should we thing positively when we just feel like thinking about it negatively?!

Additionally most of us can chew on failure and mistakes with ease and greatness. Think about your last failure! Were you feeling down? Did you complain to someone? Yes, you did that self-blaming on such an expert level, wonderful! What did you say then?

Probalbly chance you said things like:

• It was me doing that…
• Others obviously don’t…
• What have I done to make this happen again?
• On top of everything (add something even worse)
• Now everybody thinks that I… And they are right!
• I deserved it.

So what is the point of abandoning a habit we perform with such ease and elegance? Why don’t we just take it and develope it even further like:

1. Think about a success of yours (yes, success… that is the little difference) from this week. It can be a tiny banal peanut or mindblowingly huge.
2. Go back to that memory. Imagine! See and hear every little detail: how was it exactly? You might even close your eyes.
3. Start your self-blaiming!
4. Continue as long as you want.

Using professional self-blaming technique — an example

The success: I was there at the meeting five minutes _before_ it started.

• It was me doing that… — Yess, indeed, it wasn’t just luck or fate, it was totally you! So It was you doing what actually? How did you do it?
• This is very important! Be as detailing as possible! Eg:
• I convinced myself that it is not funny to be late all the time.
• I left home earlier than usual.
• I ran into a friend on the way, but I told them I didn’t have the time to chat longer.
• On top of that… my boss was also in that meeting! And on top of that I was the first who arrived. And on top of all that…
• Now everybody thinks that I…I am so precise and respect other’s time. And they are right!
• I deserved it.

See? The professional self-blaming technique is really easy. You know that, since you have used it (almost) perfectly long before this day. Now how about making it even more professional?

Photo by Simeon Jacobson on Unsplash

Assuming you are just familiar with the basics of using personas for marketing purposes, you might as well became a bit discouraged by the time and hassle that it takes to create them. This is where the role reversal interview method comes handy.

While I was a graduate psychology student, I used to write a self-help column for a glossy magazine. Each time before I started writing, I spent about half an hour daydreaming about Betty who was an imaginary twenty-something, hairdresser, and reader of the magazine. I only started to write when I felt like I was in the mood to do so. Without the slightest idea of marketing or design, I was using a persona.

You will get the most out of the role reversal interview

• if you are the only marketer or part of a small marketing team within an organization — and don’t have the resources to conduct a six hour persona workshop.
• if you are a marketing consultant working with a very small company and again don’t have the resources for a complete workshop. (As it was with our story about the SolutionSurfers.)
• as part of a larger (persona) workshop to make the whole event more colorful and fun.

Creating a proto-persona with a role reversal interview

A role reversal interview is a really quick and fun way to create proto-personas. The technique is borrowed from Jacob Moreno’s psychodrama, a therapeutical action method, which uses dramatization and role playing (among others) to help clients gain new insights into their lives. With a little twist, we will now gain insights into our customers’ lives.

There are dozens of beautiful methods and tools out there for creating marketing proto-personas, aiming for empathy towards the client. Still, all are using questions and stories about the customer to figure out the most about their lives, motivation, needs etc. This is where role reversal interview technique is different: here, persona workshop participants don’t think about customers, but actually think as customers by getting in their shoes, behaving, and talking like them while playing the role of them in a short buyer interview.

Here is the structure of such an interview.

1. Instructions for the exercise

Since this method requires some (role) playing fun, which might not be very usual in business environment, the facilitator should create the space and atmosphere with some motivational instructions. First, choose the persona you want to investigate and have the person who will play the role of that persona.

It is always nice to create some new physical arrangement for an interview like this. For example, you can make a stage by separating two chairs from the group- one chair for yourself and the other for the person playing the role. The instruction goes like this:

Our goal is now to research our personas in depth to get to know their motivations, needs, ambitions, hardships, their habits — and their lives. I will be the market researcher and you will be the persona, our twenty-something single city-woman. (Tell them everything you know about the persona up to that point to help them warmup for the role.) I will ask questions about you and you will answer them as the persona, in Singular 1.

If you have a specific customer or customer case in mind, I encourage you to use it, but it is not a must. You will recognize that you have valid answers for some of the questions — based on your experience or data -, but several details are to be improvised based on fantasy or gut feeling. Don’t think too much about your answers, just say what pops into your mind. For example, I definitely will ask for the persona’s name: just tell a name, don’t worry, nothing is set in stone, we can adjust everything later. Everything is clear? Can we start?

2. Warmup for the role / role interview

In psychodrama, there is a continuum describing the immersion into roleplay. One can play the role without any empathy (role taking) and with real immersion (role creating). Of course the goal here is to help the protagonist (the one who is playing the persona) to get playful, spontaneous and to really act, feel, and think like the imaginary character. Real immersion brings the best insights (and is the source of serious fun).

Good morning Ms! How are you?

Thank you so much for your time and effort to participate in our research as a client of XY company. I will ask you a few questions about yourself and your thoughts about the product, but it really won’t take more than 20 minutes. If there are any uncomfortable questions, just tell me to skip those. I hope this interview will not only be useful for us, but enjoyable for you too. Do you have any questions about this? Can we start?

If she has questions now, consider it a good sign because it shows that she has already started to feel and create the role. How she behaves is already useful info regarding the personality of the persona.

To start, I will ask you some simple and short questions about you.

Here comes a list of short, fast Q&A, mostly about demographic information. Name, address, family status, living conditions, workplace, position, maybe some working history etc.

Although you’re just searching for basic data, you can also make this part conversational. If she says she is living in Ohio, you might chip in and say “Oh! It is such a nice place, I lived there for five years!” Or if she has four kids, don’t hesitate to say ‘Wow, four kids?! And if you have time for a conversational interview like this. You gotta know something: If you want her to play, create the atmosphere by being playful yourself.

The faster and more natural the answer comes, the better your interviewee takes (plays or creates) the role. If you feel she needs more help, you can always ask some more warm up questions, like:

What are you doing, how was your day before we met?

Describe yourself in three words / sentences. Tell me your best skills and some areas you’d like to improve in.

3. The customer interview

Here you can ask questions as if you are in a real interview, including:

General questions:

Tell us about your day! What’s a typical day like for you?

What do you like in your work / life? What are your hardships or pain points? Can you tell me an example?

What skills do you think you need to be outstanding in your job / field?

How do you see yourself in five years? What do you want to accomplish? What are your short term goals?

Questions connected to your business:

What do you know about X (the product or service) in general?

How do you know about our business? How was your first connection to us?

What do you think about our product? Tell me three words to describe it! What does it mean for you?

How do you get new information? How do you learn? What media you use?

Have your list of questions (from general to specific) ready, but don’t cling to the ‘proper’, premade order. Remember that an interview is not a mechanic list of questions, but rather a casual, playful chat. This also stands for the way you word your questions. ‘What media you use?’ is rarely the appropriate form. Instead the interviewee will mention something about Facebook at some point. Than you might say: ‘So you use Facebook for getting new information about X. How do you do this? What other sources do you have?’

It’s also OK if you leave some questions unasked: even if you spend a significant amount of time preparing those questions, you have to be ready to let some of them go. Focus on the interviewee (instead of your own questions) and just go with the flow.

It is always nice to close with these:

Is there anything else I haven’t ask, but you consider important?

Is there anything you want to ask?

4. Leaving the role

After saying thank you and wishing all the best for the persona, you have to take the person out from the role by saying something like:

Thank you, Real name, you can be yourself again.

If you marked the roleplaying with some altered physical arrangement, now you can disassemble it, eg. ask the role player to go back to her seat. After some optional discussion, you can go on with another role player and next persona chosen.

FAQ

1. My client / workmates / participants are not actors. This is a very unusual and difficult task for them.

You will be surprised by how well your participants will play! Trust them and expect some hidden talents to unfold. On the other hand, pretending to b empathetic can truly be hard sometimes. But my experience is that people know their clients way better than you would think. If nothing works, simple role taking without real immersion, though not the best we know, but can go a long way too.

2. I am not a psychologist and don’t have any experience with psychodrama or therapy. Isn’t using a therapeutic method dangerous?

A role reversal interview is not therapy, just a tool borrowed from a therapeutical system. Unless you make participants playing their mother’s or significant other’s role, it is very unlikely that you will run into something that you cannot handle. But why would you? Dynamic style and accurate, strong-minded instructions will also help to avoid any misunderstandings.

3. Okay, we’ll do this. How is this useful for us?

If you are not convinced about using personas, read the suggested articles below. The role reversal interview technique is a simple, quick and fun tool for creating a persona. You can do it in no more than 20 minutes with only one person. If there are no more people available to participate in the role-playing in person, you can still do it remotely through a call or a video call. It can work as a stand-alone tool, but it can also be embedded or transferred into more complex inquiries, like:

• conducting a group interview with several participants playing the different personas at the same time. Imagine what can happen if they start to interact with each other!
• asking participants to collect questions, planning the interview or even to conduct it.
• your idea here.

You can always get closer to your clients (personas) just by thinking about them in a focused way; regardless of the method you use. Like the glossy fan Betty who became just like a friend to me as time went by. With the role reversal interview technique, you can exceed thinking _about_ your fictitious clients: you can actually meet, or even _be_ them. You will become friends with them and never forget them. What is empathy if not this?

List of useful resources on personas

Why?

• 8 Reasons to Use Buyer Personas to Guide Your Marketing
• Marketing Personas vs. Design Personas: What’s the Difference?
• Creating Personas

How?

• How to Make Proto-Personas and Get Everyone on the Same Page
• How to Use Persona Empathy Mapping

What?

• The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions
• 20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer Personas

Header image credit: WOCinTech Chat @ Flickr

Create Marketing Personas in 20 Minutes Using Role Reversal Interviews was originally published in Discern and Deliver on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.