Case Study: Iron Mountain Uses Personas For Marketing Success

Iron Mountain's marketing team found that its product development priorities were driven more by advancements in technology than by customer challenges and pain points. To help remedy this — and therefore increase product differentiation and fit — visionary product marketing managers created personas that helped them understand the goals, attitudes, and behaviors of both institutional buyers and end users of their products. These personas have helped to create a shared vision of users among disparate stakeholders and to improve email marketing campaign responses by up to 300%. Technology product management and marketing professionals interested in emulating Iron Mountain's persona success should make sure their personas are based on sound fundamentals, focus on one project at a time, and get stakeholder buy-in early to promote persona use throughout the organization.