Building PR Campaigns Around Customer-Requested Features

Product teams that listen to their customers create better features, but marketing teams that tell those stories create lasting competitive advantages. When companies build features based on customer feedback and then craft PR campaigns around that co-creation process, they transform routine product updates into powerful narratives about responsiveness, partnership, and customer-centricity. These campaigns don’t just announce new functionality—they demonstrate a company’s commitment to listening, adapting, and valuing the voices that matter most.

Understanding the Power of Customer-Driven Feature Storytelling

The most memorable PR campaigns don’t just highlight what a company has built; they showcase why it matters to real people. When Burger King invited fans to reinvent the Whopper using an AI platform, they created more than a marketing stunt. They built a campaign that positioned customers as co-creators, generating thousands of personalized virtual burgers and extensive user-generated content that spread organically across social channels. This approach demonstrated how integrating customer ideas directly into PR messaging creates authentic engagement that traditional product announcements rarely achieve.

Customer-centric communications work because they shift the narrative focus from corporate achievement to customer empowerment. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign exemplifies this principle by featuring real photos taken by actual users, turning customers into both the creators and the heroes of the story. American Express took a similar approach with “Small Business Saturday,” building an entire movement around supporting customer businesses rather than promoting their own services. These examples reveal a fundamental truth: campaigns that put customer needs and contributions at the center generate more trust, engagement, and media interest than those that simply tout company capabilities.

The framework for building these campaigns starts with identifying which customer requests have shaped your product roadmap. Document the feedback channels where these requests originated—support tickets, user forums, social media conversations, or customer advisory boards. This documentation becomes the foundation for authentic storytelling that can be verified and amplified by the customers themselves.

Creating Compelling Co-Creation Narratives

The storytelling techniques that resonate most deeply around co-created features blend emotional authenticity with concrete examples of customer influence. Guinness’ “Made of More” campaign succeeded by focusing on themes of loyalty and inclusion, using real stories about real people to create emotional connections that transcended product features. This approach works particularly well for customer-requested features because the story already has built-in authenticity—actual customers asked for something, and the company responded.

Building these narratives requires identifying specific customers whose feedback directly influenced feature development. Reach out to these customers early in the campaign planning process to secure their participation as case study subjects or testimonials. The most powerful stories include direct quotes about the problem they faced, how they communicated that need to your company, and the impact the resulting feature has had on their work or life. These personal accounts transform abstract feature descriptions into relatable human experiences.

Interactive elements can deepen engagement with co-creation stories. Shutterfly’s baby name generator campaign demonstrated how participatory tools allow audiences to experience personalized features themselves, creating memorable interactions that extend beyond passive content consumption. For B2B companies, this might mean offering interactive demos that showcase customer-requested functionality, while consumer brands might create tools or experiences that let users customize or personalize features in ways that reflect the original customer input.

Video content amplifies these narratives by putting faces and voices to the co-creation story. Short documentary-style videos featuring customers discussing their feedback journey, interspersed with product team members explaining how they responded, create compelling content for press releases, social media, and landing pages. These videos serve multiple purposes: they provide media outlets with ready-to-publish content, give customers shareable material for their own networks, and create lasting assets for future marketing efforts.

Demonstrating Retention Impact Through Data-Driven Storytelling

Proving that customer-requested features drive retention requires establishing clear metrics before and after feature launches. Track specific KPIs including feature adoption rates among existing customers, changes in churn rates for users who adopt the new feature, customer satisfaction scores related to the feature area, and support ticket volume for the problems the feature addresses. Companies like Nordstrom use analytical platforms to forecast customer preferences and measure the impact of responsive changes, providing a model for linking feature development directly to retention improvements.

Data visualization transforms these metrics into compelling PR content. Create infographics that show the journey from customer request to feature launch to retention improvement, using timeline graphics to illustrate responsiveness and bar charts or line graphs to demonstrate measurable impact. These visual elements make complex data accessible to journalists and social media audiences while providing concrete evidence of customer-centricity.

Customer satisfaction data adds qualitative depth to quantitative retention metrics. Conduct surveys specifically asking customers about the new feature, their awareness that it came from customer feedback, and how it affects their likelihood to continue using your product. Net Promoter Score changes before and after feature launches provide another measurable indicator of loyalty impact. When GoPro tied user-generated content campaigns to contests and challenges, they created measurable engagement metrics that could be correlated with customer loyalty, demonstrating how interactive campaigns generate trackable retention indicators.

Incorporate retention proof directly into press materials by including statistics in press releases, creating dedicated case studies that follow specific customers from feedback to feature adoption to renewed contracts, and developing comparison data showing retention rates for customers who use requested features versus those who don’t. This data-driven approach transforms subjective claims about customer-centricity into objective evidence that resonates with media outlets and potential customers alike.

Activating Customers as Campaign Advocates

The customers who requested features make the most authentic advocates for campaigns promoting those features. Burger King’s AI-powered Whopper campaign succeeded partly because it activated customers as co-creators and advocates, encouraging them to design virtual products and share their creations. This approach generates organic advocacy because customers feel genuine ownership over the outcome.

Develop a structured advocacy program that identifies customers who provided the original feedback, invites them to participate in campaign activities, provides them with shareable content and talking points, and recognizes their contribution publicly. This recognition might include featuring their names in press releases, inviting them to speak at product launch events, or creating dedicated spotlight content about their influence on product development.

Social media engagement strategies should make it easy for customer advocates to share their stories. Create branded hashtags specific to the feature and the co-creation story, develop social media toolkits with suggested posts and images for customer advocates, and actively monitor and amplify customer posts about the feature. GoPro’s user-generated content strategy demonstrates the power of inviting customers to share their stories and videos, effectively turning them into brand ambassadors who extend PR reach organically without paid promotion.

User-generated content campaigns can be structured around the new feature itself. Launch contests or challenges that encourage customers to demonstrate creative uses of the requested feature, showcase how the feature solves their specific problems, or share before-and-after stories about their experience. These campaigns generate authentic content while reinforcing the message that customer input shapes product development.

Tools for managing customer stories and feedback publicly include dedicated community platforms where customers can submit and vote on feature requests, public roadmaps that show which customer-requested features are in development, and case study databases that catalog customer success stories. These tools provide ongoing content sources for PR campaigns while demonstrating transparency and responsiveness.

Selecting Channels and Formats for Maximum Impact

Distribution strategy determines whether customer-driven feature stories reach their intended audiences. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign succeeded partly through its multi-channel approach, combining personalized product packaging with social media amplification and traditional media coverage. The physical product itself became a distribution channel, with each personalized bottle or can serving as a conversation starter and social media prompt.

Press releases announcing customer-requested features should follow a specific structure: lead with the customer problem and feedback, explain how the company responded, detail the resulting feature and its benefits, include direct customer quotes and retention data, and provide information about how other customers can provide feedback. This structure tells a complete story while providing journalists with all necessary information for coverage.

Video content works particularly well for these campaigns because it can capture emotional elements that text alone cannot convey. Create multiple video formats including short social media clips highlighting customer quotes, longer documentary-style pieces showing the feature development process, tutorial videos demonstrating the new functionality, and customer testimonial videos discussing impact. These varied formats serve different channels and audience preferences while maintaining consistent messaging.

Interactive digital tools, quizzes, and calculators engage audiences in unique ways that static content cannot match. These formats work particularly well on social platforms and blogs, where they generate higher engagement rates and more shares than traditional articles. For customer-requested features, interactive tools might include feature comparison calculators, ROI estimators, or configuration tools that help prospects understand how the feature applies to their specific situation.

Timing and frequency considerations affect campaign impact. Plan campaign rollouts to coincide with industry events where target audiences gather, schedule social media content to align with peak engagement times for your audience, and maintain campaign momentum over several weeks rather than concentrating all activity in a single day. Burger King’s campaign demonstrated how combining AI-generated personalized content with sustained social media amplification optimizes rollout for maximum impact.

Media outlet selection should prioritize publications and platforms where your target audience consumes information. For B2B campaigns, this might include industry trade publications, business technology blogs, and LinkedIn. For consumer campaigns, consider lifestyle publications, social media influencers, and local media outlets. Niche market focus often generates more meaningful coverage than broad mainstream pitches, particularly when the customer-requested feature addresses specific industry or demographic needs.

Email campaigns to existing customers and prospects should tell the co-creation story while encouraging engagement. Segment email lists to prioritize customers who provided original feedback, those who have expressed interest in the feature area, and prospects who match the profile of customers who requested the feature. Personalize email content to reference specific feedback when possible, creating direct connections between individual customers and the broader campaign narrative.

Measuring Campaign Success and Iterating

Track both traditional PR metrics and customer-centric indicators to evaluate campaign effectiveness. Media coverage metrics include number of placements, reach and impressions, sentiment analysis, and share of voice compared to competitors. Customer engagement metrics include social media mentions and shares, website traffic to feature pages, feature adoption rates, and customer advocate participation rates.

Retention metrics provide the ultimate measure of whether customer-requested feature campaigns achieve their business objectives. Compare retention rates before and after the campaign, track customer lifetime value changes for feature adopters, and monitor customer satisfaction scores related to company responsiveness. These metrics demonstrate ROI and justify continued investment in customer-driven feature development and PR.

Gather feedback about the campaign itself from participating customers, media contacts, and internal stakeholders. This feedback informs future campaign iterations and helps refine approaches to storytelling, channel selection, and advocate activation. The most successful companies treat these campaigns as ongoing programs rather than one-time events, building systematic processes for identifying customer requests, developing features, and creating PR campaigns around the co-creation story.

Conclusion

Building PR campaigns around customer-requested features transforms product development from an internal process into a public demonstration of customer-centricity. These campaigns succeed when they tell authentic co-creation stories, activate customers as advocates, and prove retention impact through data-driven storytelling. The most effective approaches combine emotional narratives with concrete metrics, distribute content across multiple channels in varied formats, and maintain focus on customer voices throughout the campaign.

Start by auditing your current product roadmap to identify features that originated from customer feedback. Document the feedback sources and the customers who provided input. Reach out to those customers to gauge their interest in participating as advocates or case study subjects. Develop a campaign framework that includes press materials, social media content, video assets, and interactive tools. Establish metrics for measuring both media impact and customer retention outcomes. Launch your campaign with clear calls to action that encourage other customers to provide feedback, creating a virtuous cycle of listening, building, and storytelling that strengthens customer relationships while generating ongoing PR opportunities.