The Experience Strategy Podcast · 2026-06-03 · 25 min
The Experience Strategy Podcast Hosts: Aransas Savas, Dave Norton, Joe Pine Featured articles: " Death of the Segment: Why Personas Are Killing Personalization " - SwiftERM " Your Personas Are Outdated. It's Time to Evolve Your Approach ." - Audrey Chee-Read, Principal Analyst, Forrester Every other post on LinkedIn is announcing the death of something. Most of it is alarmist storytelling dressed up as insight. But under the noise, two recent articles - one from SwiftERM, one from Forrester - are pointing at a real problem: personas and segmentation, built for an earlier era of marketing, have become a drag on personalization in the era of AI. Dave, Joe, and Aransas trace where personas actually came from, why they got merged with segmentation, what AI changes about the math, and what should replace the persona as the stable determinant companies are still looking for. The answer Dave keeps returning to: situations. Key Ideas Personas were never built for marketers. Dave opens with the history. The persona originated around 1999 - 2001 as a design thinking technique to get engineers to think more like customers. It worked.
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