Brands like Kleenex, Dove, Hitachi, Kashi and Donovan are delivering their features and benefits through engaging stories about customers and employees.
Storytelling is the new differentiator. Facts and figures, specifications and price all still matter, for certain. But it takes stories to connect with customers on an emotional level. The motivation to choose one brand over another – when the choices are endless – is triggered by emotion.
How can you build compelling stories into your marketing messages which develop new chapters and spin-offs that will, ultimately, humanize your brand in a variety of fresh ways?
* Create a compelling story line for your company: How to use what you know about your existing customers to develop storylines that give context and emotional impact to your product or service.
* Leverage story lines to link your customers with your brand based on shared common interests and experiences.
* Create more brand/customer “intersections”: use that common-ground knowledge along customers’ buying paths
* Engage with your customers more meaningfully: the storytelling process helps you engage and interact more with customers, making you more relevant to them, and offering a significant competitive edge.
* Leverage future “chapters”: once you craft your stories, you set your brand up for future chapters or spin-offs that hold to a consistent theme. Storytelling allows you to evolve your brand with its customers.
Andrea Learned is the founder of Learned On Women and the co-author of Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy – and How to Increase Your Share of this Crucial Market. She is a leading marketing-to-women expert, speaker, writer and blogger who finds storytelling a key to … well, just about any marketing approach.