A modern approach to personas: the Persona Levels framework
The P1/P2/P3 model is an alternate take on traditional marketing personas and a system for structuring campaign messaging and rolling out campaigns.
Stijn Hendrikse first introduced the model as a tool in Kalungi’s arsenal of marketing leadership talks about the basis of the idea in our book, T2D3, and the team at Kalungi has installed the method into marketing systems at 200+ software companies.
Lately, I’ve been socializing the concept in a new setting, which has highlighted/uncovered some loose ends in the source material and helped me add clarity to certain pieces of the model—these are some of my updated thoughts.
Traditional marketing personas (the old way)
Marketing personas often fall short of their promise. They take a lot of time to create, and you end up with overly detailed profiles that are built once, rarely referenced, and often forgotten.
You’ve probably seen these: “Suzy, a Marketing Director who drops her kids off at school at 6 am, yap, yap...” They’re hyper-specific and rigid, and you scratch your head and chuckle at them because they’re both overly simplistic and overly detailed and still don’t give you much of a real foundation for doing good work with them.
It’s not my intent to shame anyone for building these. Most marketers learn to create these at some point. I’ve made plenty of them, too. But over time, I’ve felt they’ve limited my work ability to do good work.
Persona Levels (the new way)
It’s simple and flexible—the Occam’s Razored version of persona development.
It promotes the idea that there are three fundamental roles on a B2B buying team:
P1: Hands-on IC users, who prioritize functionality & ease of use
P2: Team leads, who prioritize operational efficiency and team alignment.
P3: Strategic managers, who prioritize significant outcomes like ROI, scalability, and risk mitigation.
The Persona Levels framework does a few things:
It creates a single consistent language that’s shared across teams. When I say “P2,” everyone on my team knows who I’m talking about, and what level of abstraction is needed, regardless of vertical or market segment.
It doesn’t multiply exponentially with market complexity, like traditional personas. You don’t need to rebuild the wheel for every campaign; you just update relevant titles for targeting purposes and adapt messaging to fit each P1, P2, or P3 within the relevant context.
It supports a clear messaging hierarchy. P1 personas need high-level, strategic content. P2 personas respond to tactical, actionable insights. P3 personas require hands-on, practical solutions.
It works for (almost) any program—ad campaigns, content creation, ABM messaging, you name it.