Now, I’m not recanting anything I’ve previously said or written about personas. Detailed personas are valuable, provided they’re properly researched and used, and especially when a website needs to serve a variety of very different populations. Unfortunately, I tend to see detailed personas (just like “George”) that are invented — rarely researched and never tested. That’s not good enough. The whole point behind the persona development process is to test and verify what we think we know about our market. If you can’t stick to the full persona development process (I get it — it takes more time than we usually have), don’t make them up. You’re better off generalizing your personas in terms of one specific behavior, because no matter how detailed a persona may be, it cannot do its job without being framed in terms of buying. The good news is that the four stages of the buying cycle represent four personas that everyone doing marketing on the web has in common.