I, like many, was captivated by the scene from Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street where Jordan Belfort asks a potential employee to “sell me this pen”. “It’s a fantastic pen”, “the ink lasts for years”, “it’s ergonomically designed for the perfect balance”, it does this, does that. Blah, blah, blah. Great, so it’s a good pen, but why would I want to buy it?
Let me tell you a story. I brought one of these pens 2 years ago and I love it, it’s never let me down, it’s never leaked and it’s so comfortable to write with that during long conference calls I can fill an entire page with beautiful doodles.
That’s the power of advocacy and it’s also the future of marketing communications. If your product is great, then harness the advocacy of your customers by telling their stories. If your product isn’t great, then you’re not going to have great customer stories to use in your marketing activities, so you’re going to have to either make something up or make your product better, and get some advocacy going. I’d suggest the later.
Technical data and facts about your product are still necessary but if that forms the basis of your marketing communications then you can do more, and will achieve better results by weaving together your customers stories with brand communications like product features and specifications. Let your advocates do the hard work and validate the great design, feature-set and quality of service that you’ve invested in.
To see this in action, take a look at how Porsche are using StoryStream to surface customer stories and build this into their global marketing activities.
Porsche’s North American #NoSubstitute campaign presents customer stories from a range of different social channels. This isn’t simply an aggregated view of hashtags, it’s an expertly curated, evolving story that’s operating at a massive scale. Looking at it, it’s hard not to get a true sense of the emotional connection that the people have with their car. For Porsche the benefits are obvious, more meaningful content that embodies the emotion that Porsche owners have with their cars. They love them, they’re true advocates of the brand and their stories absolutely demonstrate that. These individuals are doing the hard work for Porsche.
“Porsche is a company built on amazing stories and working with StoryStream is a great partnership. The platform helps us connect and reach out with new audiences across our channels and is helping enrich our web presence with live content, overall allowing us to leverage amazing Porsche stories globally.”
Deniz Keskin Manager Digital & Dialogue Marketing
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