Actually, these are three inter related sub questions.

Q1. Does Persona have to be a person because ultimately whatever we will create (product/service) that will be used by human being only, and while creating persona we understand personas as fictitious characters representing the real user.

Arron Walter’s quite famous example of persona - Mailchimp is a modern ape, even persona for Firefox browser is not a human. How do these represent personas and still solve the purpose of utilization by normal users is the thing I am thinking of.

Q2. What is the difference between brand ambassador, mascot and persona? I strongly think that there has to be some inter relation between these three. But I couldn’t figure out what it is! Seems like both brand ambassador and mascot can be derived (at least few characteristics) from the persona created already.

Q3. How do we validate created persona? This is a contextual question with respect to above mentioned thoughts as if we (designer) go for a different path for creating persona, how can we validate that we are still on the track?