One alternative way of thinking about your buyers is seeing them as a (potential) tribe, as suggested by Seth Godin.
In the classic approaches, marketeers define a “target audience”, represented by static personas. Then, typically through advertising, brands try to win their interest and stimulate purchase. This mindset is not that far from the archaic ‘magic bullet theory’.
More than half a century later, we probably can do better than that, can’t we?