The power of personal stories can create a visceral understanding of your brand and its value that are difficult to achieve in any other way. They can help to provide a clear understanding of what is at the core value of your brand that is unique and makes you stand out from the crowd.

How do you communicate your customers’ experiences, and why? You could load prospects up with a list of features, talk about key benefits, and describe for them the problem/solution set that your offer provides.

Or you could tell a story in which they see themselves.

If your organization hasn’t yet figured out how to reach out to your customers in a dialogue about what they truly love about your brand (and what they don’t), well, you are in good company. But you can’t afford to wait to seek out those voices and those stories. And if you already have, make sure that you have an ongoing process in place to keep talking.

Many organizations have evolved to the point of conducting customer satisfaction research, event, service and product evaluations, and even collecting testimonials from their customers.  These are all worthwhile activities – lending credibility to the assertion that your service has been successful for your customers, and can be so for others.

But to communicate to both your own organization and others outside your organization the true benefits of your work – the ways in which what you do changes lives – there is nothing more illustrative than a story told by your customer.

A compelling story is one in which we care about the storytellers, and we see ourselves in their faces. If your relationships with customers and members are too distant to know those stories, then you have larger problems than marketing mix. It’s possible you have lost sight of what the real benefit is to your  work. If that is true, my best suggestion is to meet and talk face-to-face with your customers.

Don’t sell it.

If you are thinking of using customer profiles, case studies and stories to strengthen your brand; be very careful about coupling these with a sales message. Stories are compelling stuff; but believability is at the heart of their power. A customer story is not a testimonial, it’s much bigger than that.  It goes to the heart of your brand and values.