Guidelines for Preparing Your Product Stories

 Guidelines for Preparing Your Product Stories

Your own personal product story is a powerful business tool in creating new customer relationships, teaching other distributors and demonstrating the effectiveness of the Herbalife mission in changing lives.

Your personal product story is also yours. It belongs to you and will have its own unique characteristics. You will want to be comfortable with your own product story, as you will use it over and over again. So your product story should be your own, not one borrowed from someone else.

As in all aspects of life and business, we always follow any legal requirements that apply. So these guidelines provide good practical advice and also incorporate legal requirements you will want to follow.

What should I include in my product story?

Let’s begin with your story. Every potential new customer wants affirmation that any purchase they make will be a valid one. So they will listen to your story with great interest.

Begin by writing some things you may want to consider. Some questions below may start you thinking:

o How did you first find Herbalife?

o What products did you start with? What results did you get?

o How did you feel? Did you notice any change in your feelings of energy?

o Did you lose any weight?

o What new aspects of life did you discover or re-discover because you lost weight?

o What can you do now, that you couldn’t do before?

o How did your view of good nutrition change?

o Have you made a life change in your nutritional habits?

o Are you fitter and healthier than before?

o Do you enjoy greater activity or exercise?

o Do you now play any sport?

o Have you shared your products with your family?

o Anything else that you consider important that makes this YOUR story!

How do I shape my personal product story?

Now that you have a pool of information to choose from, select the parts of your story that you are really proud of. Your future customers will listen to your story, but will be inspired by your emotion. Write your story down and revise it over a few days. Then, practice your story, so it really becomes yours!

How about the legal side – what do I need to know about what I can say, or what I shouldn’t say?

Recent changes in European law affect the claims we can make when presenting our own product story (testimonial). The biggest change is that it is now not permitted to make a claim that consuming any food can result in a certain amount or rate of weight loss. So a quick checklist of DOs and DON’Ts below will help you to validate that your Product Story is legally correct.

DO:

Include a reasonable weight loss claim associated with a change in lifestyle. Include your Herbalife products, together with some indication of a balanced and varied diet and an increase in physical activity (for example: a 30 minute walk, some gardening, playing with the children, etc.); 

Refer to a “reasonable weight loss,” defined as loss of no more than 1 kg per week, from a starting point that does not represent clinical obesity (as a guide, a clinically obese person is one with a BMI over 30);

Use before and after pictures if you want to illustrate your results. Be sure that the weight loss pictorially represented is reasonable;

Talk about overall lifestyle changes in your testimonial, not just about weight loss.

DON’T:

- Attach any specific weight loss claim just to the Herbalife Formula 1;

- Use the actual words “before” and “after”, associated with weight loss pictures;