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Voice is what we craft to tell a story. But, says Aarron Walter (@aarron), user experience lead for MailChimp and author of Designing for Emotions, we’ve been faced with a lot of companies telling us dishonest stories. In fact, we’ve been told tons of dishonest corporate stories. In a presentation “The Real Me: Crafting Honest Customer Relationships” at Future Insights Live in Las Vegas, Walter gave the following examples:- Vitamin Water, which is sold as a healthy drink, has the same sugar content as a Coke.
- BP says it's an environmentally conscious oil company, yet it caused the world’s worst oil spill.
- Bank of America sells American values but was instrumental in the destruction of our economy.
Honesty Sells
Contrary to historic advertising practices, being childlike, honest, authentic, personal and kind are all advantages in business today. It’s no longer advantageous to pull a fast one on your audience. And thus the way companies crafts their stories has changed: The old method: Company speaks its message over and over until it’s the truth. The new method: Company lives its story, and in doing so creates a relationship with customers. A value system is how you live your life. To create a value system for a company, you start with your own values and turn them into values for all, explains Walter. Personal stories are possible for even the largest companies. In his presentation, Walter showed a video from GE where mechanics and engineers talked about how they took so much pride in building jet engines. It’s worth it to you to inject a personality into your product design, said Walter. It provides the following benefits:- Stand Out: Personality-driven products and features allows you to differentiate yourself. Walter used the example of the travel service Hipmunk and its “agony” index for flight choice.
- Emotion and Memory: People will always remember the way you made them feel. They might not always remember what you said.
- Find Your tTribe: Personality brings people to you. Some personalities don’t match. But humans want to belong and be part of a tribe. If you design a solution for everyone, you find no one. You need to pick an audience.
- Passion: You’ll discover passion in your users. They will often supply the stories, content and ideas, and be the advocates for your company and its products.