6 alternatives to a ‘tell us your story’ campaign

Soliciting customer stories is fast becoming an overused marketing tactic, and often, it doesn’t really work. These techniques may yield better results.

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That was the message from marketing executives at a recent Ad Age Digital Conference. Adobe’s chief marketing officer, Ann Lewnes, for example, said, “Brand love leads to story making. The ability to get [consumers] to participate is so much easier than ever before.”

While there are great ways to find those customer stories, the easiest (or laziest) seems to be launching a campaign that invites customers to share theirs. The “tell us your story” campaign has become so routine that there’s now a Tumblr blog dedicated to the concept. Tell Us Your Story collects campaigns shared by readers who can submit images, in addition to those ad copywriter Brian Eden finds on his own. Eden is behind the Tumblr blog, which he created after seeing “Tell us your story at drpeppertuition.com” on a Dr. Pepper can he was drinking.

“I don’t have a Dr. Pepper story to share,” he told ClickZ. “My story is I bought it and I drank it.”

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