Persona Non Grata? A Case for Breaking Away from Persona Marketing

Why Persona Marketing Falls Short in Franchise Development

Jack Monson, Chief Growth Officer at Thunderly.

The idea of persona marketing is simple: create detailed profiles of your ideal candidates based on demographics, behaviors, and interests and make targeted campaigns that supposedly resonate with them.

While this method has been popular in many industries, is relying on personas for marketing franchise ownership opportunities effective?

Franchise development marketing is a very different vibe than the numbers game of consumer marketing. The decision to invest in a franchise is too personal, nuanced, and dynamic to be reduced to static stereotypes.

Personas are static and often based on outdated research. A candidate’s behavior changes as quickly as the marketplace does. Static personas can’t keep pace with evolving technologies or economic changes that impact how and why people consider franchise ownership.

A persona like “corporate refugee” ignores the motivations and circumstances that drive individuals to explore franchise opportunities. It reduces the decision-making process to stereotypes and assumptions, missing the mark with potential candidates who don’t fit neatly into predefined boxes.

One last knock on personas: Do you fit any certain persona? Personas feel like something that we think fits everyone else but not ourselves. I’m guessing that we’re all in dozens of CRMs labeled as some persona that we would argue is a bad match with the real us. It’s a snapshot of what someone else wants us to match. This risks alienating high-potential candidates who don’t align with the imagined archetype. It leads to marketing efforts that feel inauthentic and out of touch.

Here are a few ideas to break away from the templated personas and create marketing messages that may touch someone at a place and time that matter to them.

Stop generational targeting

The first step to get away from using personas is to stop lumping so many people together and calling it targeting. Let’s start with overly simplified age groups.

Many marketing experts have hung their hats on marketing to Millennials and now marketing to Gen Z. We’ve all been subjected to endless talk of targeting each general age group, and each group makes broad assumptions about the next. Good targeting is not painting 90 million people with the same brush.

Market to situations

Share content that people in the right situations will find compelling.

Stop retelling your origin stories and start looking at conversion stories within your brand. No one cares about your franchisees’ demographics, age, gender, ethnicity, or background. Candidates want to hear about the experiences that lead to successful business ownership. Were they in a similar situation? That’s what makes an impression.

Improve content creation

Are your ads generic? Have you used phrases like “be your own boss” in the past few years? It’s time for a change!

The content of your ads is all that matters going forward. The growing AI focus by ad platforms means less manual targeting and more views of your ads based on the content and the likelihood of engagement.

Adopt intent-based marketing

When strategies are designed around what prospects are actively seeking, franchisors are far more likely to find prospects in an appropriate place in the decision-making journey.

For instance, someone searching for “best franchises to own in 2025” is likely in the early research phase while someone exploring your franchise’s financial requirements page is closer to making a decision.

Tailoring your marketing efforts to these intent signals yields better results than relying on persona-based assumptions about what your audience might want. These intentions ignore the candidates’ demographics and personas, and so should we!

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