The Speech industry added the concept of Personas just a few years ago as a Design tool to align any new designs with an existing company brand/image and to model an ideal customer service representative.
But the web (in particular the field of Usability) has long used Personas in a different sense: a “User Persona” as a stereotype built to model a customer/user so companies can better understand their audiences when developing products/services.
Here’s an interesting article about Adding a Persona Touch that talks more in detail about these types of Personas, and how to use Persona marketing in a b-to-b environment .