COTA PERSONA WORK

THE CHALLENGE

COTA needed to move beyond generic marketing to truly understand and serve Central Ohio's diverse transit riders. With a customer base spanning everything from daily commuters to occasional convenience riders, the challenge was creating authentic, data-driven insights that could inform how COTA communicated with its core customers and potential new audiences. When analyzing the traditional demographic data, the picture wasn't clear enough; COTA needed to understand the real people behind the ridership statistics, their unique needs, motivations and how they actually experience public transit in their daily lives.

THE OBJECTIVE

Create comprehensive customer personas based on actual rider behavior and data that would inform every aspect of COTA's operations, from marketing campaigns to service improvements, ensuring messages resonate with real people and real COTA customers.

THE APPROACH

Working from EMC Research's comprehensive data analysis of over 5,188 customer profiles, Hunter Marketing brought COTA's distinct personas to life through AI-generated visual designs and compelling narrative storytelling. We transformed raw behavioral data covering everything from trip logistics to payment methods into relatable human stories that COTA teams could immediately understand and apply. 

Each persona received a unique visual identity and detailed backstory that captured their real motivations, challenges and transit usage patterns. By combining AI technology with strategic storytelling, we created personas that feel like real people rather than data points, enabling COTA to build campaigns around authentic individuals like James the Seasoned Commuter or Emily the Student Rider, ensuring messages resonate because they're crafted for actual people, not generic audiences.