What you’re missing when you only build for personas
A good example of why you need a Chief Behavioural Officer
Reading time approx. 5 minutes
Good morning. Let's start this Tuesday together. Because, as always, "It is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong."
Why every company needs a Chief Behavioral Officer to unlock the hidden universals in human decision-making
A few years ago, I was consulting for one of the biggest banks in Germany. Sharp people. Great product. They were pouring a ton of money into customer research, building detailed personas like Corporate Cathy, Startup Steve, and Developer Dave. You know the drill.
One day in a strategy session, they were arguing whether Cathy would respond better to one specific ‘Call-to-Action’ or another CTA. Hours were spent debating this. Testing it. Re-testing it. Meanwhile, we had just launched a pilot version of the product in Austria that had outperformed expectations, and nobody could explain why. Different culture, different context, same amazing result.
So I asked the room, what if the success wasn’t about where they lived or what job title they had, but about how the human brain works everywhere?
Silence. Then someone said, you mean the same cognitive stuff works across the board? Exactly. While they were zooming in on micro-differences, they had completely ignored the macro-truth. Humans, across cultures, are wired in very similar ways. We all respond to loss aversion. We all prefer immediate rewards. We are all influenced by social proof. You don’t need twenty personas. You need one brain.
That moment changed the company’s approach. Instead of optimizing based on fictional traits, they started building for the behavioral common ground. Cost per acquisition went down. User retention went up. And the teams suddenly spoke the same language, the language of human nature.
How Does It Work? Science, Baby!
Human psychology is strikingly universal. While our personalities and cultures shape how we express behaviors, the drivers behind those behaviors are shared. Research across behavioral science, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience shows that the basic architecture of decision-making is consistent because our brains evolved for the same challenges: surviving, reproducing, cooperating.
Key principles like loss aversion, status signaling, reciprocity, default bias, and scarcity effects are not Western or Eastern phenomena. They are human phenomena. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s findings on System 1 and System 2 thinking have held up across dozens of cultures. The same goes for the peak-end rule or the paradox of choice. These mechanisms do not care about your job title or your age. They shape your behavior anyway.
When organizations focus narrowly on persona-based marketing or UX, they risk building for surface-level differences rather than the core motivators that drive behavior. Behavioral science, on the other hand, gives us a framework that works across roles, industries, and geographies.
Why This Is Important?
Our brains are built similarly, and they respond predictably to the same behavioral cues regardless of identity or persona. This means most organizations are missing a huge opportunity by focusing too much on demographic differences and not enough on universal drivers of behavior.
Why is it important to deal with the phenomenon of shared psychological drivers?
Let me tell you a story.
A global e-commerce brand once built separate campaigns for every region they operated in. Local designers, custom messages, different pricing tactics. Then a new behavioral science consultant asked them to test a single campaign, built around the fear of missing out, across every market. One campaign. Same wording. Same visuals. No localization.
The result? It outperformed the localized campaigns in 9 out of 10 regions.
Because here is what they finally realized. Urgency, loss aversion, and social proof do not need translating. They are embedded in our biology. The brain does not ask, is this message tailored to my persona? It asks, am I about to miss something important?
When organizations ignore this, they waste time, energy, and budget tweaking tactics that do not move the needle. But when you understand how shared human biases drive action, you build more effective products, messages, and teams faster and with less friction.
That is why not having a Chief Behavioral Officer is not just a missing title. It is a missed opportunity. Without someone to champion universal behavior patterns, companies keep reinventing wheels that have already been optimized by evolution.
And Now?
So what can you do differently today
Start any project by asking what is the behavioral pattern here, not the persona trait.
Before segmenting your audience, list three things they all share as humans, and build from there.
If you are launching a campaign or product, test it in unexpected places. If it works across cultures, it is probably based on a strong behavioral principle.
Create internal documents that explain your strategy in terms of cognitive levers instead of demographic details. You will get better cross-team alignment.
And here is a surprising one: Interview people outside your target group. If your message still resonates, you have probably hit on something universal.
Bottom Line
Human behavior follows patterns and most of them are shared. Build for those and you win bigger.
Checklist for the moment of truth
When you are about to make a product, communication, or design decision
Ask: Am I basing this on demographic traits or behavioral patterns.
Identify the key human bias or heuristic at play such as scarcity, anchoring, or social proof.
Test the same idea across different groups not to see if it works but to prove how deeply it works.
Avoid over-customizing until you have proven the universal concept does not hold.
Bring in a behavioral perspective even if you have to be the Chief Behavioral Officer yourself
Chief Behavioral Officer wanted
Where are management decisions made every day that are still based on people acting logically? Where can you be a Chief Behavioral Officer yourself this week?
See you next time.
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