I Love Analogies
June 22nd, 2007
It’s not a big surprise, I’m sure. I really enjoy a good analogy. Or even a mediocre one. Our good friend Justin speaks in analogies and metaphors and similes all the time. I think it’s because he’s such a visual thinker, it helps him to create an image for himself.
That’s why I’m a big believer in using images and analogies in research. You can interview every single employee and customer for a given company, and they will all be willing to give you excellent factual input on precisely what that given company does… heck, I could probably write an entire prospectus from those sorts of interviews. But what we’re looking for is something else. To develop an identity, of course you need to know the nuts and bolts of the business, but what we REALLY need is for the employees and customers to step outside of that concrete realm and speak emtionally and experientially, getting at the soul of a brand.
The problem is that emotions and images are right-brained activities and language is left brained. So… my aim is to get people to stop outlining their business plans, stop repeating the company line seven times. Take a step back and look at your business through the lens of another industry, personify it, choose a muppet for yourself. Often in interviews, I find that people don’t even know exactly why they’ve drawn the analogy they did, but it doesn’t take long to start hearing common threads and common vocabulary…
And that brings me back to my last post…
with common ground.
See what I did there?
Other posts by Jennifer.
Patrick says:
Cool, I see Justin is a fellow Winthrop Alum. I myself graduated from Winthrop and was a Mass Communication Major in the late 80’s/Early 90’s. I also minored in creative writing so this subject really hits home with me. I’m constantly using analogies when talking to customers and potential clients, in fact I was using quite a few today to explain RSS to a potential customer. I was also amazed at how passionate I was getting when using the analogies of older ways of doing things except with newer tools. A customer was asking why in the world he would want to leave comments on someone else’s blog (like I’m doing right now) and I explained it was the same reason someone writes a letter to the editor to a newspaper or magazine except it so much better. In fact I um show the comment I left on your post yesterday as an example and how my comment on your site leads back to my site. It’s so exciting to see the lights go on in their head when you apply a “new concept” and they “get it.”
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:36 pm