From Personas to Experience Appetites

Personas are widely used in marketing, tourism, and user-experience design to represent typical consumer types. They are highly effective for understanding identity, motivations, and communication strategy. However, personas often fall short when used to predict specific consumer behaviors across different situations. 

This project introduces experience appetites as a complementary layer to personas, capturing the situational motivations that emerge in specific consumption contexts. By integrating personas and experience appetites, this research offers a more complete and behaviorally predictive model of consumer decision-making. 

Personas explain:

• Who the consumer is 
• Their traits, values, and tendencies 

Experience appetites explain:

• What the consumer wants in a specific situation 
• The motivations activated by context 

This project proposes a two-layer model:

Personas shape how contexts are interpreted
Experience appetites determine what behaviors follow

Personas are widely adopted but have clear limitations:

• They assume stability across situations 
• They overlook within-person variability 
• They provide limited behavioral prediction 

In contrast, this research shows:

• The same persona may behave very differently across occasions 
• Different personas may behave similarly in the same context 
• Behavior is better explained by situational motivation than identity alone 

Data collected across tourism settings (ski areas, beaches, Disney, camping, museums) show:

• Repeat visitors to the same destination exhibit different motives and behaviors across trips 
• These changes align with: 
  • Companions (family, friends, solo) 
  • Occasion (celebration, relaxation, bonding) 
  • Emotional state 
  • Season 

Key insight:

Variation within the same person across situations often exceeds variation across different people

This project integrates:

• Personas → identity-level understanding 
• Experience appetites → situational motivation 

Into a unified framework that:

• Preserves the narrative and empathy strengths of personas 
• Adds behavioral precision through situational drivers 
• Improves prediction in highly contextual environments like tourism 

This project can be developed into a journal article through:

• Formal empirical testing of the two-layer model 
• Quantifying predictive improvement over persona-only models 
• Extending beyond tourism to other consumption domains 
• Linking appetites to measurable behavioral outcomes

This project can be developed into a journal article through:

• Formal empirical testing of the two-layer model 
• Quantifying predictive improvement over persona-only models 
• Extending beyond tourism to other consumption domains 
• Linking appetites to measurable behavioral outcomes

• Do experience appetites improve behavioral prediction beyond personas? 
• How do contextual variables activate different appetites within the same individual? 
• Can personas predict which appetites are likely to emerge? 
• How should marketers integrate identity and situational segmentation?

Assistant Professors
Looking to extend widely used frameworks (personas) with stronger behavioral models

Doctoral Students
Interested in segmentation, consumer behavior, or tourism

Researchers in:
Consumer behavior, UX, branding, tourism, services, or decision-making

Extended abstract, slides, conceptual framework, and project notes are available upon request.

Request project materials or start a conversation to explore:

• Independent development 
• Collaboration 
• Data collection support or funding

Most projects can be developed into conference submissions or journal articles with appropriate empirical testing.