Meanwhile, in the real world...

There are some fascinating people out there, who are more than happy to talk about themselves, look familiar, but don’t actually exist.

“Hi! I’m Gina. I’m 46, have two teenage daughters, I’m an Office Manager for a law firm, I read The Guardian and interior design magazines, I like keeping fit and supporting charities, and I spend time on Twitter and Facebook. I live in the North West and I would say the websites I visit most are BBC News and anything with kittens covered in salami and wearing lederhosen. Why? Because I’m not real, dummy!”

If you work for an organisation that sells something, has a website, or generally feels it needs to understand more about their customers’ “experience”, you may well have met Gina, or someone like her.

She might have looked like your burly marketing guy, or the barely-out-of-her teens social media whizzkid, but that’s only because they’ve been talked into making her up, then had to go through the excruciatingly embarrassing process of ‘being’ their creation so that you and your colleagues can discuss how best to communicate with them and fulfil their needs.

If the sight of Big Dave from Finance pretending to be a teenage girl called Kaz isn’t sufficiently awkward to make you wish for an immediate meteor strike, pinning your hopes on him getting inside the mind of his creation sufficiently to salvage some scrap of usefulness from the whole ghastly experience may be a request too big for the universe to deliver. And before coffee and biscuits, too.

You’re more likely to get “I like reading magazines and looking at my phone and hanging out with my friends.” than “I’m an Instagram-native and rock my own YouTube channel with 10,000 followers and I loooove a good selfie.” (and I’m probably seriously wrong about that too, for all the same reasons).

And that’s the problem. If we were all able to know exactly what any other person, of any age or gender, liked, thought, read, did or wanted to find on your website, then the world would function much more smoothly, and we’d all be e-commerce millionaires.

We may well have sorted world peace too. Imagine it – if we all knew what someone else desired, and could deliver it for them when, where and how they wanted it. Wouldn’t that be... well, kind of dull, actually.

Everything is easy to locate? Where’s the thrill in finding something exciting by chance? No new music needed – we already know what people like. We’d be stuck in a world of stagnation. What would be the point of risking coming up with something entirely innovative, when our customers already know what they need? No iPhones then – I already have a great camera, MP3 player, phone, video camera and a diary.

Maybe it’s best we still need to ask Kaz. Perhaps we should go outside and find out what she thinks. Big Dave doing the voice as well is too freaky.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 5th of February 2016. It's getting on for three weeks now since they updated the 'Opinion' page on their website, but just in case you feel like hanging around to see if any columns ever show up again, head here.

This post sprung forth after a tricky bout of roleplay at work on the day of writing. I'm naturally rather introverted, so this kind of thing is a full-blown horror-show for me, and the increasing irritation at having to pretend to know what my made-up person might think when they arrived on our website left me feeling particularly irritated by column-penning time.

Happily, rather than just vent about it, I was able to slightly justify why I think it's ineffective. And I felt better afterwards.

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( Temporary suspension of the CD A-Z to listen to a new arrival, a-ha's latest, "Cast In Steel". Great so far...)

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