In “Think like me, agree with me” Seth Godin pinpoints the importance of telling your customer a story she can relate to. Facts are not always the most important ingredient, the crucial part is to understand how the customer thinks and present the story in a way that is interesting to her. Find an anchor point to start the conversation, and don’t forget to include what makes you different (as happened with Rhapsody, via Crosstargeting).

Combining the “what can the customer relate to” with “what we are unique in” results into more than one story, more than one campaign and more than one creative. Of course this means that you have to spend more time when preparing your stories, but the increased audience is well worth the work. Never forget: you are still talking about what you can do best. Phrasing it in a way that different audiences can relate to also yields interesting results for you. You might come upon interesting aspects you hadn’t thought about until now. Caroline Williams from Aedgency has some case stories on this topic.

And how do you find those different stories that are interesting to tell about your product or service? Ask your team (or friends whom understand the product well) to explain its virtues to their parents/grandparents/uncles/neighbors. As these are people that have most probably a totally different world view, yet they your team members know them well enough to adjust the story and to get good feedback from the “test audience”. Document these experiences and group them together to get story clusters. From here it shouldn’t be too difficult to construct 3-5 different stories about the same product/service. Which you can then market through different channels.

• musings