“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh

Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more realistic these Persona portraits are, the better. Good experience management teams, like the one we work with at the City of Brisbane, go beyond words, actually depicting each citizen persona, hanging the resulting pictures on the wall, welcoming these prototypical “people” into the design discussion. Using Personas is, quite simply, an Service Experience Management (SEM) best practice. But, in this post, the goal is to shout out a caution, highlighting the need to pair your “Customer Personas” with matching “Brand Personas”.

‘Cause here’s the rub: when we think solely about satisfying a Customer Persona, the Brand may be left behind. SEM’s prime directive is to create experiences on brand and on budget. The challenge is to design to the diversity of our Customer Types, while preserving the integrity of our Brand.

Great artists, like hacks, return to the same images again and again. Unlike hacks, they know that their images must morph, shape-shifting to match the requirements of artistic imperative. Vincent Van Gogh’s work is the most valuable art ever made because he poured himself onto the canvas without ever repeating himself. So, what can we experience managers learn from a man who painted 37 self-portraits , each unforgettably unique but each uniquely Van Gogh?

Van Gogh: love-tormented ear-slasher; suicide; never sold a painting. As with so many legendary personas, we all know Van Gogh, even if a lot of what we know isn’t true. Naifeh’s new biography, renders a genuine Van Gogh more interesting than the Van Gogh of Hollywood. He was, in life, a bizarrely flawed man, mentally ill, pummeled via family. Terrible flaws can anneal into deep genius; Van Gogh manufactured, from his pain, a relentless life force, endowing thick dabs of paint with electric impact.

This transformational magic is front and center in his self-portraits. For me, a museum gallery containing one of Vincent’s raw, despair-coated, weirdly-colored self-images rarely seems to contain anything else.

Naifeth’s biography explains that Van Gogh’s paintings are pictorial messages, pleadings to the people in his life. Hollowed and haunting eyes; prominent nose, broad forehead, Dutch beard: all the key attributes of the artist’s face are rendered realistically. Still, a glance is sufficient to see that each self-portrait chisels a different facet of the man; Naifeth shows that Van Gogh, in fact, worked like a mad-man to bend his “brand” to a desired message.

During his tenure in Paris, Van Gogh desperately wanted friends and family to see him as potentially successful and reliable. He creates, as shown above, a self-persona of the tidy business man, felt hat on head, elegant coat buttoned, ready and able as a commercial artist. The textured blue background, toned in white, delivers an impression of solidity.

Here, Vincent abandons the bourgeouis trappings, and focuses instead on the core of the working artist. The painted man steps out of the canvas-colored background, and into the canvas on the easel. An arm becomes a palette plus hand; the body is swaddled in a traditional painter’s smock. Tightly knit red & green strokes are rendered to form a deep shadow across the face, the normally sharp features flattened. Together, these choices help mutate Van Gogh into the anonymous every-Artist.

In the prototypical Self-portrait above, we feel the sadness and tight-lipped despair of the troubled man, even as we are captivated by the hyper-realistic, blue-shaded eye. The bluish-black ground matches the black eye, both reek of depression. The loose, wild brushstrokes and spiked hair give us the impression of a man on the edge. The first self-portrait is an advertisement; this is a cry for help.

Later, Van Gogh left Paris for the South, and waged a campaign via art to persuade Paul Gauguin to join him there. Gauguin was, at the time, evangelizing a “Japonais” style. To proclaim himself a true disciple, Van Gogh transforms himself into a monk, complete with the slightly slanting eyes, balding pate and gaunt profile of the Oriental priest.

Notwithstanding all the variation, Van Gogh never surrendered the core of his brand: realistic drawing; emotive colors; impressionistic brushwork. We easily recognize Van Gogh both as the person in the paintings and as the artist behind the painting.   But, wow, he sure stretches style a long, long way in pursuit of meaning.

Do Van Gogh’s techniques for matching Persona to message translate into our world of Experience Management?  Here are three tips lifted from these examples that can illuminate our use of Citizen/Customer Personas:

1.) Create A Branded Partner

Create a partnered Brand Persona adapted, to the limits of brand integrity, for the needs and expectations of a particular Customer Partner. In other words, treat Personas as “twins”, where each Customer Persona has a pal. Van Gogh gave Gauguin an oriental version of himself, suited to Gauguin’s vision. We shouldn’t abandon our Brand to give Customers the design aesthetic they want; we should manufacture a morphed Brand Persona stretched to appeal to a particular Customer Persona.

2.) Creatively utilize Background Mood

Most enterprises have detailed style guides prescribing the use of fonts, icons, colors and brand treatment. We can’t throw away our Song Books and Style Guides to re-design for each customer segment. But, that’s no excuse for monotony. Van Gogh understood that “background” emits huge influence on the experiential mood. His backgrounds are stunning kaleidoscopes, not mere afterthoughts. Each self-portrait background sets the table for the painting’s message. The pink-tinged blue of Felt Hat is uplifting and confidence-inducing; the canvas colored Working Artist doubles down on the theme; the chaotic blue-black of 1887 swirls with anxiety; the restful, beautiful multi-shaded aqua of “dedicated to Gauguin” is a Japanese print personified. The experiential surround around required brand elements can similarly alter mood and emphasis to suit the needs of a Persona. Explicitly separating the “foreground” of our brand requirements from the “background” of our Persona-matching requirements creates a powerful model for experience-oriented design that preserves Brand integrity while allowing for Persona-specific adaptation.

3.) Use details to dress up the Brand for the occasion

A key theme of SEM is the need to attend to the details. To make his point, Van Gogh cloaks himself as needed. To make himself Gauguin’s priest, he dons a simple, almost cape-like cloak, lengthens and narrows his neck, prominently features a medallion on a pure white collar. Van Gogh adjusts detail to create a Van Gogh fit for purpose. We can do the same with our Branded Experiences.

How amazing is it that each self-portrait is a composite of hundreds and hundreds of mutually reinforcing brush strokes? In the masterwork below, Van Gogh emerges from a halo; his face somehow 3-dimensionally real from a welter of converging streaks. Every fleck of paint conforms to a desired pattern.

In oil or HTML, relentless focus on detail delivers experiential energy.

(Mark Angel is EVP and CTO, KANA)

 

 

 

 

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