Over the Christmas holidays I went home for a week. As is often the case at the end of the year, my family discussed what we’d enjoyed over the last year, which in turn became myself and my father trying to ‘sell’ each other our favourite things from 2007 – in my case, Last.fm and in his case the Slim Devices Squeezebox. I was interested that we both made the same claim about our favourite products; “it’s changed the way I listen to music“.
Both of these brands are incredibly fortunate to have this said about them; not only because “it changed the way I do something fairly fundamental” is a powerful piece of word of mouth marketing, but because it’s going to keep happening. It’s easy to remember and talk about the things that changed our lives, and they’re interesting to hear about because very few people’s lives or habits change often.
To go back to my post about narrative, these are the kinds of stories we incorporate into narrative about ourselves. However small the area of our life they affect, they still become part of us and part of what we talk about. To look at this from more of a product than a marketing point of view this time – do you want your product to change people’s lives? Do you know what that change would look like?