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Buyer Legends by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Anthony Garcia

The full title of this book by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Anthony Garcia is

Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide“.

In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a rating of Four Stars. This means I think it is good.

Here is my book review.

Customer persona plus use situation and moments of truth

This book, by introducing the concept of buyer legends, tries to solve a problem with marketing where all the little improvements you make don’t add up to a big improvement because some cancel out others in a one step forward, one step back dance.

Basically a buyer legend is a story that combines a customer persona with a use situation and the moments of truth in the buying process.

It uses the example of a technophobic middle aged entrepreneur who needs to replace the lady who does his payroll with a payroll service. The buyer legend identifies the key issues and then tells how the purchase was encouraged by what the entrepreneur saw and experienced. The process encourages you to identify what can go wrong in the story so that you can strengthen the story and experience.

As someone who has used customer personas (aka profiles or avatars) in the past as well as identifying different use situations and moments of truth, I like the way the buyer legend brings everything together in a way that can be easily understood by the marketing and customer service teams.

I have three issues:

1) The book refers in passing to different buying styles but doesn’t properly explain the concept or the different permutations.

2) The buying legend creates a very precise user experience with particular needs but it doesn’t address the issue of multiple buying legends co-existing together. For example, the book says that the middle aged entrepreneur found comfort from looking at photos of similar aged people to him on the website but for a non-age related service, those middle aged people could well make the company look stuffy to entrepreneurs in their 20s. They may not appeal to those of more advanced years either although I’d expect that to be less of a problem.

3) It would have been nice to have seen several other buyer legends developed for different types of business.

One of the reasons why I like using customer personas is to be able to compare and contrast the issues of the different personas to help identify where we can safely compromise and where we have to be brave to attract some but repel others.

This is a good book and I’m going to try changing my process to build coherent buyer legends to see if we gain more in precision than lose in flexibility.

It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

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