There are a few questions here about personas, and research methods that you might use in order to create them, (some of which I've answered at length). Examples include:
However, I have an exciting opportunity to create a set of personas less directly connected to the users themselves. More specifically, the personas relate to:
- A department within an organisation, as distinct from other departments
- Each set of product lines within that department
- Individual products within those product lines
There are of course real people involved in the department, the products, etc. There are those that work in the organisation, those that develop the products, and those that use the products, but the personas are not about those people.
The intention is to drive future development and design in a consistent manner within a division and across products. It's not as focused or directed as a style guide - it's like a persona for a user experience, that covers all touchpoints.
For example, these personas could anthropomorphise elements into human traits and characteristics, or they might communicate through human emotional channels like colour, shape, art, elements of nature, sound, voice, tone, music.
We can use some elements of traditional persona research. For example, interviewing stakeholders is ok, but ethnographic research is out. We can validate the persona with real product users to see if they identify them with the product, but obviously can't ask the products if they identify with its own persona.
So what alternative or additional tools and methods could we use to create and validate such personas.
Answer
I would probably not call anthropomorphous objects 'personas', but I think I see where you are going. Two things first:
I would normally expect a product 'personality' to be the result of a branding idea/process and not the other way around (brand is friendly > product is friendly).
My background is not in marketing but in social sciences.
Two interesting research pieces you might have checked already are On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism and Pushing the Envelope of Brand and Personality: Antecedents and Moderators of Anthropomorphized Brands. The second one is based on the first, but applies the 3 principles to anthropomorphized brands.
Anthropomorphism describes the tendency to imbue the real or imagined behavior of nonhuman agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions, or emotions.
Epley's article describes three psychological determinants to our tendency to anthropomorphize: the accessibility and applicability of anthropocentric knowledge (elicited agent knowledge), the motivation to explain and understand the behavior of other agents (effectance motivation), and the desire for social contact and affiliation (sociality motivation).
Levy (1985) and Plummer (1985) provide evidence that consumers easily view brands as possessing human characteristics. The tendency for consumers to utilize brands as symbols in expressing one’s self-concept arises from the fact that consumers imbue brands with human personality traits (Aaker 1997).
Regarding the process of anthropomorphizing objects, you will find plenty of examples (an excellent resource: The Anthropomorphic Food and Kitchen Gallery). A brand that I like and keeps a consistent 'personality' in its products is Suck UK. You can probably find a dozen more like it.
I can only see an anthropomorphized department as a sum/average of the standardised characteristics of its members. I don't think it's too different from creating personas, actually. It would be an average of an average, sort of. I can easily imagine a commonplace persona for the development team I work with.
A game could actually give some interesting insight, something like asking people (the actual people in the company) to write some keywords of how they imagine an archetype from another department. I think a nice example of something similar is the Mac vs PC video(s).
A very practical advice: Buy those bags full of googly eyes, print some buildings and glue the eyes to them. It's amazing what a pair of eyes can do, we can't ignore something with them. It's instinctive (the bigger the eyes, the more attention we pay, because it might mean a bigger predator). 'Gamifying your persona creation' can make things much easier and fun.
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