So what is a persona? And what does a persona look like? This is a really good question because there is a lot of confusion among marketers about what a persona is. Case in point, I once asked the chief marketing officer to describe for me what his target persona look like, his response was Mike, were going after Chief Information Officers of the global 5002, which my response was, gee, could you be any vaguer than that? That is not a good description of what a target persona is. First of all, it's too broad.
It's trying to be all things to all people we know, intuitively instinctively, that all CIOs of all companies don't think the same. And if you're targeting a pool of applicants that make up the global 5000 You know, that's, that's just too broad. We know CIOs of large companies don't think the same way as CIOs of small startups. We know CIOs based in Germany are probably thinking differently than CIOs in the US, etc, etc. So that is much too broad. Another example, when I asked him VP of marketing to describe for me who his target personas were, he responded, Mike, we're going after nine segments.
And each of our nine segments have nine sub segments. And I thought, good Khan, really at one, you're telling me that you've got 81 distinct target markets. We had a conversation on that, and we realized we actually came to the joint conclusion that that was actually not correct. So what we want to do is be more focused, we need to be zeroing in on the specific individuals and the behaviors. And when we degenerate the persona into a short little statement of CIOs of the global 5000 or we're going after nine segments with nine sub segments. We missed a lot.
And we ended up confusing our teams. Neither of those are good persona examples. And so segmentation is not enough. We need to go one step beyond segmentation to understand the persona. And in fact, I would define the persona as actually a personalized extension to a target segment. It's a fictional representative of a real set of people.
And even though it's fictional, they must behave and interact as if they were real people sharing their goals, their objectives and their experiences. That's the information that helps us define a group of people who share characteristics that we can target. And while the persona is not a real person, he or she must feel like a real person. The last thing I'm going to say about this, at this particular time, is that sometimes personas get confused with stereotypes and stereotypes. Have a negative connotation. And we as marketers need to try very hard to avoid that.
When personas become stereotypes, then it shows that we really don't understand them. And more importantly, we don't respect them. And if we don't respect them, then our messaging and our positioning, we'll share elements that will clarify that we don't understand them, we don't respect them, and that can lead into trouble. So a persona is a tool to help us focus and drive our marketing. But at the core at the center of this, we must always be respectful and have empathy towards the people that we're trying to market to