A DR persona answers one question: "What is the exact mental state of this person at the moment they encounter my ad, and what would have to be true for them to buy?"
Demographics (35-45, female, household income $75k+, suburban) are nearly useless on their own. What matters is the internal monologue - what they believe, what they've already tried, what they're afraid of, what they secretly want, and what language they use when they talk to themselves about the problem.
This step produces first-pass persona sketches. I usually aim for 3-5 core personas, though that’s not a hard range. I typically find any more than 5 becomes hard to manage.
Here’s the prompt I use for this:
I put this into Claude and Parker then compare the outputs. My final personas are usually a combination of the two.
Once you’re happy with the personas you have selected across Claude/Parker, move forward into deep analysis for each persona.
Run the Persona Analysis on each persona. Then combine all of the outputs into a master persona doc.
Once you have personas defined, Parker tends to be better at running the deep analysis and Claude because of the richer VoC data. So I do this step inside of Parker (just make sure you have reviews and post-purchase surveys in there if possible).
Here's the prompt I use. The only thing you need to change about this prompt is the [PERSONA NAME].
This is to get you up to baseline. Do NOT neglect manual research too!!! Here are all the data sources I look across:
Data sources: