The Voice of the Customer
28th June 2006 by Lorenzo Sierra, ABC
Sometimes I find myself crafting messages that have no resemblance to the way people actually talk. When this happens, I have to redirect myself to a funny and insightful video I found.
The video is at www.nonbox.com. If you go to that site, there is a link on the left-hand navigation called “movies.” After you click on it, you will see a selection of short films. My favorite is “Garage Guys.” In “Garage Guys,” two middle-class American men are sitting in a garage drinking beer. The two are talking in language used in countless beer commercials.
After watching that video, I can go back to crafting messages that have meaning to my audiences.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:40 am
It’s so important to be able to connect with the audiences. What good is messaging if our audiences never understand? Unfortunately, you see so much advertising today that doesn’t connect with audience at all. Branding is vital to a company, yet so many are getting it wrong. I look forward to visiting nonbox.com to connect better with my audiences. Thank you.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Ah, the ‘voice of the customer.’ There must have been a memo sometime earlier on that decreed we should not dare write in that voice!
Great example with the ‘Garage Guys’ video. Lorenzo’s making a powerful and sensitive point here. Employers (often unwittingly) indoctrinate their people into company-speak, and this spills over into the external communication. I struggle with this everyday. The operational word in Lorenzo’s post is the part about ‘crafting.’ In the eighties, in the ad agency world at least, this meant polishing copy to sound like it was ‘on brand.’ Then we turned the ship around, and tried to communication that ‘resonated’ with customers. Blogs are accelerating this. It’s not enough to resonate, but to get inside their heads.
On the subject of beer ads, there’s a batch of ads from Miller that are very funny too, but they involves customers talking not about cold-filteration and horses, but uncrafted man-talk. In fact it’s called Manlaws (www.manlaws.com).