Tapping into Design: Creating User Personas in Craft Beer

Craft beer is an integral part of the Portland community. Still, with 105 breweries in the metro area alone, how can great beers stand out in our increasingly saturated marketplace? Further, as craft beer consumers become increasingly promiscuous, how can craft breweries build consumer loyalty? This workshop provides attendees with an introduction to developing user personas, a component of the design process that has the potential to provide craft breweries with the insights into their customers that will allow them to build better businesses. Design thinking and marketing tactics are integral components of the University of Portland’s Online Continuing Education Certificate: Craft Beer Business Strategy. Personas are a design methodology that develop empathy for an organization’s consumers by creating fictitious characters that embody specific characteristics of target consumers. The goal of the persona creation process is to move breweries away from standard ways of categorizing their consumers by product type or price point and toward embodiments of core traits and a holistic understanding of consumers’ needs, motivations, aspirations, and desires. Whether you’re a brewery owner, home-brewer, beer enthusiast, designer, or you own a small business; this workshop will guide you through developing user personas—all over a beer, of course.

In this session, attendees will:

• Be introduced to the key terminology, concepts, and perspective of design and design thinking from the context of craft beer
• Be guided through an interactive, template-based methodology for building user personas for their own organizations
• Gain insight on how to develop a unique identity and product mix for target users that builds consumer loyalty while reinforcing your brand
• Develop empathy towards their organization’s consumers in a way that quantitative reports of marketing or sales data cannot accomplish
• Receive detailed copies of handouts of notes from the session, worksheets and templates for applying the concepts and frameworks that will be presented, and a curated packet of readings and articles drawn from the workshop

A workshop presented by:
• Sam Holloway, PhD, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
• Mark Meckler, PhD, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
• Ian Parkman, PhD, Assistant Professor of Marketing
• Jennette Lovejoy, PhD, Associate Professor Communication Studies
• Keith Carrato, Director Global Merchandising & Product Management (Mens), KEEN

Design Week Portland: Wednesday April 26 4pm-6pm – Some seats still available – sign up soon!
https://www.designweekportland.com/events/tapping-into-design-creating-user-personas-in-craft-beer