Chapter 10, Buyer Persona Script: Delilah Digital

Delilah Digital is 37 years old, married, with two children who are in school. She has a BA degree in Humanities. Her husband is a product manager at Clorox. Delilah has always been interested in photography, but recently took her interest to the next level. Along with thousands of other tech-savvy peers, Delilah recognized the business opportunity that advances in digital photography coupled with the increasing bandwidth available on the internet provided to somebody in her situation.

Delilah purchased a $1500 prosumer digital single-lens reflex camera with a couple of nice lenses, a new computer with Photoshop CS3, and set up shop as a photography studio. She turned to BluDomain for an inexpensive, easy-to-maintain, but very appealing web site. She took pictures at weddings for a few of her friends just to get some practice; now she is doing some senior portraits and weddings along with the occasional family photograph. She is hopeful that the coming Christmas season will bring lots of family business.

Her prices are about 2/3 of the studio that has been in town since she was in middle school. She has enough business to keep herself busy about half the time, but would like to do even more.
While she has primarily relied on word-of-mouth for her marketing, she knows that she needs to be more professional about getting the word out. She recently bought a yellow pages ad, and last summer spent about $1200 on a direct mailing to Seniors.

That’s the good news. The rest of the story is that she is completely overwhelmed by the unanticipated complexity of this brave new world of digital photography. She recognizes that she could spend the rest of her life studying Photoshop and still not learn everything. She has resorted to lurching after various highly-acclaimed plug-ins to try and bring her quality up and the complexity of the workflow down.

She has also learned that the automatic mode on her camera isn’t the setting that the photographer who has been in town since middle school uses when he takes pictures. There are so many variables that have to be accounted for every time you push the shutter – composition, lighting, posing – and did you remember all the right settings for white balance and exposure compensation and ISO and on and on and on.

She is also feeling guilty about the rate of money that is going out compared to the rate of money that is coming in. She is spending not just on cameras and lenses, but on software and lighting and meters and tripods and training and magazines and books.