Why drudge through a 50-page PowerPoint deck to get your customer insight when you could listen to it on your way in to work?

This is the question we posed to one of our client teams at Bose recently, and boy were they intrigued. Half a dozen podcasts later, something incredible happened – senior-level decision makers who were often a challenge to engage emerged to praise the format. They were listening!

“I like the podcast format,” said one stakeholder, “I listen once while in the car commuting, but obviously need to focus on the road so I then listen a second time while relaxing on the beach - where I can give it my undivided attention.”

While the idea of using a podcast to tell a story is nothing new as of late, they’re not being used internally at the enterprise level to bring customer stories to life. Yet what we find most intriguing about them is they lure the internal audiences that are typically the most difficult to acquire (decision makers, executives), simply because it frees them up to consume the content during timeslots where their eyes can be doing something else (e.g., driving, running, or yes – relaxing on a beach).

We know that customer understanding is directly tied to business success, so why would you attempt to shoehorn the customer story into a format decision makers don’t have time to consume? Consider the needs of your audience as we did, and take advantage of podcasts.