Table of Contents
The Play
When founders pitch features, American audiences tune out. Frame the same value through a real person with stakes, proof, and a simple metric. Now reporters care, social shares grow, and sales replies show up. The hook is not “AI detector accuracy.” It is “A teacher who spotted AI because the essays stopped making human mistakes.” Proof, wrapped in a person.
If your product is the movie, your customers are the actors. U.S. media pays attention to people, not release notes. “We shipped v2.0” gets ignored. “Meet the person whose life changed because of it” gets clicks and calls.
The Scoreboard — Why it works
Proof beats promises. A lived example feels like evidence.
Identity fit matters. Buyers ask, “Will this work for someone like me?”
Drama makes memory. Stakes and change make your message sticky.
Status and relatability sell. “Janitor to investor” performs because it speaks to aspiration and possibility.
Make It Work — A simple shift
From feature to human.
Step 1: Cast the role. Pick a customer who mirrors your target.
Step 2: Show the before. Be concrete about pain and cost.
Step 3: Capture the turn. Describe the moment things changed.
Step 4: Quantify the after. One crisp metric beats ten fuzzy ones.
Step 5: Package for passage. Screenshots, DMs (with permission), and quotes that others can reuse.
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One hero. One villain. One metric.
Feature-to-Human rewrites you can steal
❌
“Launched: automated reconciliation module”
✅ “How a night-shift bookkeeper closed the books by 9 a.m. and got her weekends back”❌
“Self-serve analytics for SMBs”
✅ “The franchise owner who cut ad spend 18% after her dashboard exposed one leaky channel”❌
“Warehouse robotics integration”
✅ “The day a warehouse team stopped timing bathroom breaks because pick errors finally vanished”
Headlines that travel
“Meet the [role] who [outcome] with [your category]”
“‘We were doing X wrong.’ What this [title] changed first and what happened next”
“The screenshot that convinced our skeptical [stakeholder]”
Guardrails
Get written consent for names, screenshots, and numbers.
Protect the hero. Blur sensitive info.
Keep the customer’s voice. Over-polished will kill trust.
Pick one villain. Churn, errors, ad waste. Then hammer it.
From Inside the States
U.S. buyers love receipts. A raw photo of a whiteboard forecast, a Slack snippet, or an invoice line often beats a glossy PDF because it feels unedited and real. Journalists and buyers want a moment they can quote, not a brochure they have to decode. When you pair the artifact with the anecdote—“here’s the screenshot, here’s what happened next, here’s the result”—your story becomes easy to repeat in meetings, inbox threads, and group chats. Add one clear metric and a human detail, like the timestamp or the message that shows doubt turning into action. That mix creates credibility, saves people cognitive effort, and gives them something concrete to pass along.
What I Read So You Don’t Have To
Harvard Business Review shows narratives increase recall and persuasion because they lower cognitive load and anchor abstract value in real stakes. The takeaway for marketers & brands: use “challenge, choice, change,” keep numbers simple, and lead with the human who bears the consequences. Inside buying committees, these stories become social proof and reduce perceived risk.
Your 7-day Human Story sprint
Day 1: List five customers that reflect different buyer identities.
Day 2: Interview each for 20 minutes. Ask about before, after, and “what almost broke.”
Day 3: Pull one screenshot or artifact per story.
Day 4: Draft three headline options per story.
Day 5: Cut to 150–200 words plus one metric.
Day 6: Pitch five journalists or newsletters and post a native LinkedIn thread.
Day 7: Hand sales a one-pager per story for sequenced follow-ups.
Sources
Disclaimer: Some of the links below may be affiliate links*
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