When a single persona was no longer enough to tell the Cultura story

In 2024, Cultura is the third-favourite retailer of French shoppers for cultural goods and ranks in the top 20 brands appreciated for its offer and its in-store experience. (2024 annual study of French shoppers’ favourite retailers, EY-Parthenon). In the middle of a strategic overhaul, the company is looking to align its customer vision by drawing on its different internal areas of expertise. Developing customer personas aims to create an operational tool, to keep improving the customer experience, and to feed its ambitions for the years to come.

In this pilot project, Cultura asks us to develop personas for the overall brand and for three priority worlds: reading, music practice and adult creative activities. Following exchanges with 12 stakeholders involved, three major challenges were identified:

Build a shared reference framework

usable by all departments to foster a shared customer vision and align the language between internal teams and partners.

Embed diversity and a balanced mix

by going beyond the “single persona” stereotype (a 35-45 year-old mother) to represent a plurality of realistic profiles.

Evolve beyond the “expert brand” vision

toward a more approachable specialist-brand posture, capable of supporting every customer whatever their level of cultural knowledge.

To fully meet Cultura’s expectations, two other major challenges were identified:

Support the integration and uptake

of the personas in the internal processes, which means defining how they are to be used precisely, training the teams and ensuring adoption at every level, from strategic functions to in-store teams. The goal is to make them a genuinely operational tool shared across all functions.

Build a multi-purpose strategic tool

acting at once as a roadmap to guide strategic decisions and as a foundation for designing and improving the customer journeys, both online and in store.

The main methodological challenge is to break out of the usual approaches and build hybrid personas, mainly grounded in quantitative data and enriched with qualitative insights. This novel approach calls for:

• working out a method that effectively combines those two types of data
• defining segments that are robust enough for strategic decisions and precise enough to steer targeted marketing actions

This hybrid methodology marks a shift in the way we work and reinforces our ability to address the personalisation challenges of large brands.

Discovering and embracing the brand culture

With a clear positioning on the culture and creative-hobby market, Cultura has a language of its own. Our first task is therefore to absorb it. To do that, we deep-dive into the company’s internal documentation, which reveals its core values and its strategic positioning. We also study the references and key data points that provide valuable insights, as well as the business language specific to Cultura, in order to align with their essential themes and better understand the internal teams. This step lets us identify the priority themes and get a clearer picture of the internal priorities.

Learning from the field, extracting behavioural themes

Armed with that knowledge base, we head out into the field to meet Cultura customers and talk to staff in four stores selected for their relevance and representativeness: Bègles and Mérignac, on the outskirts of Bordeaux, and Villefranche and Saint-Priest, near Lyon. In each store, we observe behaviours in strategic zones, talk with customers, analyse their journeys and gather feedback from the staff.

This gives us a full panorama of customers’ perceptions and purchasing behaviours. The findings are then structured around broad themes, which from this point on become the thread of the project. Among them: the main driver of the visit, the mono- or omnichannel nature of the customer experience, and the relationship to cultural practice.

We roll out an online questionnaire structured around these key themes. Made up of dozens of questions, it is submitted to a representative sample of the adult population resident in France, allowing us to capture trends at a national scale.

In collaboration with our partners TBONTB (opens in new window) and Cohda (opens in new window), we write and distribute the questionnaire and decode the results. We process the data to extract the quantitative findings.

To ensure consistency across the insights, we cross-reference the data from our observations, the results of the online survey and some findings from external quantitative sources.

How do you move from a vast amount of data to relevant personas? It takes an effort of synthesis and extreme reduction. It’s a first for the team, who develops a method combining analytical rigour and flexibility, while adapting to the business needs.

Selecting the relevant variables

We extract around fifteen socio-demographic and behavioural variables from the quantitative survey, supported by the qualitative findings. After in-depth analysis, we narrow that number down, keeping only the variables that are most significant for explaining the variations in behaviour.

Statistical segmentation (“clustering”)

We apply clustering algorithms to statistically segment the sample into homogeneous groups, taking into account all the variables and their values. To guarantee the robustness of the segments, we check their relevance by looking at several mathematical indicators. We then select the most significant combinations of characteristics.

Persona co-creation workshops with the Cultura teams

To bring the quantitative profiles to life, we ran 4 workshops dedicated to the priority persona families: Cultura as a retailer, Music practice, Reading and Adult creative activities. These sessions aimed to feed the statistical segments with the business knowledge of the Cultura world leads and with the findings from the quantitative study. In each workshop, the working groups refined the personas from data-driven drafts, projecting themselves into concrete examples. The main challenge was to find a balance between a faithful representation of the data, a characterisation that speaks to the business teams, and traits sharp enough to avoid profiles that were too “lukewarm” and not very effective. We also took care to ensure the uniqueness and complementarity of each profile within its family.

Consolidating the archetypes and quantifying the weight of the personas

After the workshops, we consolidate the personas to end up with final, coherent profiles. The process calls for adjustments and iterations to ensure both essential requirements from the start: statistical robustness and user empathy. By calculating the weight of the personas, we reach an average of 70% representativeness, a satisfactory figure that ensures a distribution faithful to the reality of Cultura’s customer segments.

All of the persona sheets and appendices (explanatory sheets, glossary) are presented to the Cultura teams during a validation cycle in December 2024. In February 2025, we run an official transmedia presentation with animated persona videos for the whole company: an opportunity to draw initial conclusions and look ahead to the next steps.

Building a shared reference framework

shared with the Cultura teams to support a consistent understanding and smooth communication between departments. Based on cross-cutting variables, it is applicable beyond the four families already covered.

Diversity and balanced mix of the personas

bringing in a variety of behavioural, socio-demographic and cultural-practice profiles, going beyond the initial mono-stereotype.

A specialist-brand vision

with personas covering different levels of cultural expertise, allowing Cultura to address a broad audience, from beginners to seasoned enthusiasts.

Next steps

In spring 2025, we run a support project for embedding the personas so they become a genuine engine for Cultura’s strategy, ensuring their adoption and ongoing use to steer actions and reinforce the overall impact of the brand.

Following the persona presentation, a roll-out kit is made available on Cultura’s internal platform. It includes the persona sheets, animated video presentations and a podcast format, so that staff can easily get familiar with the profiles. Five immersive workshops to try out and embed the personas. Between February and May 2025, a cycle of five embedding workshops is organised with the main business teams: marketing and communication; e-commerce and innovation; commercial management and merchandising; offer and learning; adult creative activities and sustainability. Each session brings together about twenty participants around a two-hour immersive format. The structure is simple and engaging: a recap of the personas; business reflection on the information judged most useful and impactful given each team’s specific priorities; a hands-on exercise via collective work around a customer experience map and a collective debrief.

Toward a living reference: collective construction and ongoing training. The sessions allow each team to project the personas into their day-to-day work, to grasp the strategic and operational benefits, and also to formulate concrete questions around interpreting the data, using the personas, and how they evolve over time. So many questions that will feed an internal FAQ currently being designed, alongside a training module on the personas, which Cultura has commissioned us to build.

A final key moment: the wrap-up workshop. To close out this embedding phase, a wrap-up workshop brings together the leads of the teams involved, one year after the persona initiative kicked off. This key moment aims to take stock, share feedback and sketch out the future outlook. In one hour, the workshop runs across three moments: a look back at the intentions of the kick-off, a shared status check on current uses, and a projection toward upcoming needs and actions. Concrete commitments are laid down and the next steps are planned, with a new check-in scheduled in six months to keep the momentum.