Persona Research and Customer Journey Mapping as Drivers of Product Adoption in Enterprise Technology: A Systematic Review

Background. Enterprise technology continues to record high rates of underutilization, abandonment, and partial deployment, with substantial spending committed to systems that are licensed but never embedded into daily work. User-centered instruments, in particular persona research and customer journey mapping, have been proposed as mechanisms for closing the gap between procurement and durable use, yet the evidence linking these instruments to adoption outcomes in organizational settings remains scattered across marketing, information systems, and human-computer interaction scholarship. Objective. This review synthesizes peer-reviewed evidence on how persona research and customer journey mapping function as drivers of product adoption in enterprise technology, clarifies the mechanisms through which they operate, and identifies moderators, measurement practices, and gaps that warrant further inquiry. Methods. A systematic review was conducted in accordance with established reporting guidance. Structured searches across major bibliographic databases returned a large initial corpus that was screened against predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. A final set of studies was retained for quality appraisal, structured data extraction, and thematic synthesis. The synthesis was organized around adoption determinants drawn from dominant acceptance and diffusion frameworks. Results. Five themes emerged. First, persona research operates primarily on the perceptual antecedents of adoption by sharpening role differentiation among the multiple actors involved in organizational buying and use. Second, customer journey mapping operates primarily on friction by surfacing touchpoints, pain points, and moments of abandonment across pre-purchase, deployment, and post-deployment stages. Third, the two instruments produce their strongest reported effects when integrated rather than applied in isolation. Fourth, organizational and environmental conditions moderate the translation of these instruments into realized use. Fifth, measurement remains uneven, with frequent reliance on self-reported intention rather than observed behavior. Conclusions. Persona research and customer journey mapping are best understood as complementary diagnostic instruments that act on distinct but connected adoption determinants. The review consolidates these findings into an integrative framework and sets out an agenda emphasizing behavioral outcome measurement, longitudinal designs, and attention to the distributed nature of enterprise decision making.