STORYTELLING AS CUSTOMER VALUE ENHANCING TOOL

One of the most recommended tools to create customer value around your product offer is to use storytelling. Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker designed the Significant Object Project, to empirically demonstrate how adding a fictional story to an insignificant object can turn it into a significant one.

“Stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that their effect on any given object’s subjective value can actually be measured objectively.” — Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker

The idea was tested on eBay. A writer is paired with an object purchased from thrift stores and garage sales and he or she writes a fictional story about the object. Each object is listed for sale on eBay, but instead of using a factual description the newly written story is used. After 5 months, they sold $128.74 worth of thrift-store trinkets for an amount of $3.612,51. Their hypothesis was validated. The “value in trade” of the thrift-store objects was increased by the use of engaging stories attached to them.

The take-away message from the Significant Object Project is that stories increase not only the objective value of your offering but also the subjective value, which leads to willingness to pay a price premium.

Okay, now we know the importance of storytelling, but the next step will be to distinguish what kind of stories are the most successful to enhance customer value of your offering.

Heidi Cohen, president of the Actionable Marketing Guide, presents in her website 5 value enhancing stories every business can tell:

1.  Focus the story on your business history. Link your product to how the business started. This kind of strategy seems to work very well for family owned businesses.

2. Focus the story on your product’s secret ingredient. Enhance whatever is core to your total offering that makes it different.

3. Focus the story on the location of the business. Find something special of the place where the business is located and attach special stories of the place to your offering.

4.  Focus the story on the behind the scenes of your company. Bring attention to show the way people create the product. It can be done by interviewing different members of the team and letting them tell the story.

5.  Focus on the people behind the company. The idea is to gather content from your workers regarding why they chose to work for the firm, what they like about the product or their co-workers. This approach makes your offering more personal, creating a real connection between employees and potential customers.

6.  FOCUS ON YOUR CUSTOMERS! Gathering stories from your customers, showing how they discovered the company, how they use the product and why is this helpful in their lives.

As we can see, putting the customer as the creator of the story is a very effective strategy to be followed by companies. Having your story told by a trusted person seems to be crucial to introduce your product to the audience you intend to reach. 

An example of a success story is Kleenex. They wanted to shift the perception of their product from snot to style. In order to do so, they contacted hundreds of bloggers reaching an interior decorating and fashion audience, and offered them to own the first three pages of Google search results for the words "Kleenex style", this idea gave them 400% greater engagement on their blogs and at the same time the story was shared among the audience in a trusted way. Mother Overload was one of those storytellers.

BEST WAYS TO DELIVER HIGHER CUSTOMER VALUE

When the customer perceives that a product is of a great value the willingness to pay a price premium increases, and again, we are not just talking about money. After searching several sources I made my own list of the 3 best ways to deliver higher customer value:

1. Personalization

With personalization we mean that the more personalized the experience, the happier the customer. Personalized marketing are messages and actions tailored to the visitor based on their previous viewing and purchasing behaviour. 

According to a study from the University of Texas, with personalization we feel more in control because we are getting something tailored to us, but also personalization can help reduce our perception of information overload. For example, when we know that certain product features have been tailored to us, it provides a higher level of engagement as we will be presented with the characteristics we were looking for. In short, personalization is an effective tool to create a closer relation between the company and the customer, increasing therefore, customer value.

2. Efficient Customer Service

A study by Zendesk found that consumers rank customer service higher than price to stay loyal to a brand. Such a statement should make every company aware of the importance of coming up with consistent multichannel approach, incorporating email, social and a call centre, but being present is just not enough. It is essential to have a proactive approach on every channel and the main objective is solve customer’s problems delivering value. In an ideal situation customers should end the conversation with the customer service team thinking that what started as a problem ended as something beneficial.

Having an efficient customer service is one of the pending subjects for the majority of companies in the market. In a bid to reduce costs many companies make it extremely difficult for customers to speak to someone on the phone and instead force people to get in contact via email or a web form. This damages the overall customer experience, and therefore diminishes customer value.

3. Storytelling

According to Zideate, an online site where marketing concepts are explained, storytelling is a marketing tactic based on the premise that people remember information better when it is told as a story rather than presented as a list of facts. The main reason for it is that, stories evoke an emotional reaction on the audience. Marketing campaigns that arouse an emotion response are more likely to be remembered even when the public is not interested in the product. The perceived customer value can be enhanced by using storytelling as a less obvious form of persuasion. The audience will be willing to pay more for the product as they perceived it of a high value because of the story attached to it.

Conclusion

There are many more ways available to improve customer value. After researching several sources I detected the above forms of delivering a higher customer value as the most used ones. I would like to deepen my knowledge in the following posts, so I will try to find best practice industry examples for each one of them.