What Marketers Get Wrong About Ideal Person Profiles (IPPs)

In the last five years, the lines between our personal and professional lives have permanently blurred.

Thanks to remote and hybrid work, company laptops we bring home at night, and smartphones glued to our hands, we now exist as professionals and consumers simultaneously, almost 24/7.

This means the traditional ways of identifying, segmenting, and reaching target customers, such as personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs), no longer work on their own. Now, all brands must build customer profiles based on the whole person — who they are at work, at home, and in all the places in between.

It’s All in Who You Know

When the pandemic triggered a 500% increase in remote work, 58% said their work-life integration increased. This offers consumer brands a massive opportunity to reach — and potentially convert — professionals during their 9-to-5 workday.

The reverse is also true. Say a consumer who serves as a decision-maker at work streams a show one Tuesday night and sees an ad for enterprise software suited to their industry. Even though they’re technically off the clock, that individual could send an email to get the ball rolling on a meeting or demo of that product.

This is the new world we now inhabit, and old ways of understanding customers no longer serve it. Personas, for instance, are static and typically based on assumptions. ICPs focus on company-level attributes, leaving out the consumer side of the equation. Ideal person profiles (IPPs), on the other hand, bridge the gap between consumer and business data in a dynamic, data-driven way.

Leveraging enriched data, IPPs combine professional attributes — such as job title, company size, and industry — with consumer behaviors — such as content preferences, digital signals, and psychographics — and update in near-real time. This fusion of B2B and B2C data zooms in on individual decision-makers in their full context, enabling precise, personalized messaging and offers that resonate with real people, not just abstract segments.

The Type of Data You Need to Build Effective IPPs

Personas, ICPs, and IPPs are not the same, but they all start the same way — with first-party data.

Knowing your customers’ ages, genders, job titles, where they live, what they buy, and how they transact sits in one dimension. But what are they doing when they’re not with your brand? What other brands do they purchase from?

IPPs inherently bring in this enriched, third-party data — workplace identifiers, purchase intent, and digital behavior — and apply it in ways that add to what brands already know about a customer. Without this enrichment, IPPs lack the precision needed for personalization and performance. And while the best third-party data to enrich IPPs depends on your individual business, you can gauge its suitability by considering if it:

• Creates more descriptive value or power, allowing you to see characteristics of your customers that you wouldn’t otherwise have
• Drives incremental business value — if you add a digital identifier, you can find a person in another space, like CTV, for instance
• Provides predictive lift — when the data is leveraged in predictive models or as a targeting criteria, does average order size go up, for instance?

But It’s Not Just About Segmentation

IPPs offer more than just more granular audience segmentation (though that’s a great start).

They can also guide creative development, messaging, channel selection, and timing of marketing campaigns. By enriching first-party data with IDs that enable addressability, marketers can reach individuals across more channels than before. It's full omnichannel, everything from good old-fashioned direct mail to in-game. And when you centrally orchestrate these customer journeys, you can more seamlessly deploy the best channels and cadence and optimize content and creative as you go.

Tools like Dun & Bradstreet’s B2P data and identity resolution capabilities help marketers build and activate IPPs at scale. One wireless provider we worked with wanted to win back customers of its prepaid program by analyzing IPP data. They ended up with four distinct profiles through data enrichment, then developed a channel, message, and offer strategy for each, ultimately reducing customer acquisition costs by 50%.

How to Get Started with IPPs

If you're ready to extend your customer profiles beyond personas and ICPs, here are four key steps:

1. Examine data siloes: IPPs sit at the intersection of two worlds that historically do not communicate or overlap much. They require businesses to share data across teams to identify mutually beneficial opportunities.
2. Bring these datasets together. IP addresses refresh, and people change devices and emails. Marketers need access to a firm yet adaptable identity spine, backbone, or graph that can help them find target customers in more places.
3. Test and learn: Personas and ICPs rely on static data — IPPs are living and breathing. This means you need to test the application of IPPs in a live environment to determine value points, descriptive business, and predictive value. If you test 30 days in arrears, you won’t see the same value as you would if you tested in the moment.
4. Get your teams ready: There's some organizational readiness required for technology departments to build the pipes needed to bring in third-party data for IPPs. Determine how often you'll get this data, then create processes to master it in the way you need it linked into your environments.

IPPs enriched with third-party data are foundational to modern marketing and deserve strategic investment. They improve ROI, reduce waste, and build long-term audience intelligence in a way that prioritizes the whole person, activating richer, more actionable insights for marketers across industries.

 

_{Developed by Ad Age. Previously published on AdAge.com on December 3, 2025.}