AB: All-Round Nice Guy

Getting a difficult message across in a crowded marketplace is always a challenge. Whether your business has a unique product or service, or you need to educate your market even before you can consider offering them your product or service, one of the best tools you can use is a good metaphor.

By using the right language, you can make a complicated message more understandable to more people. Let me show you the benefits of using metaphors to get your message across - oh, and keep a count of how many I use along the way, and leave your answers in the comments…

—

Just a spoonful of sugar…

Thank you Mary Poppins - it does indeed help the medicine go down. Every business has important information to get across to their customers: sometimes you need to explain how your product or service works; others need to show how to purchase their products or service; and sometimes, you have to start with a blank canvas, and educate your customers from the ground up. In all cases, the one constant is that you generally don’t want to ‘dump’ all the information onto your customers all in one go - you need to pass on the required info in a systematic and easy to consume way. The simpler, the better.

If you have a customer-facing role, you may already have an arsenal of key phrases that you use time and again to get your message across. Begin recognising these phrases as you say them, and take mental note of how you paint your picture of what your business does. Keep using some of these key phrases, and literally test them out - try them on different parts of your customer base, and see which ones prove the most effective at explaining your pricing structure, or money-back guarantee, for example.

Once you begin to find a good metaphor, extend it. See if you can stretch it to fit more elements of your business. If it works for explaining your service when making a cold call, can it also work for explaining your payment options and after-sales support for that same customer later on? Is there another company - even a competitor - that does something similar? Then you could say: “it’s similar to the way XYZ does it, be we do it better by adding this…”. Obviously, a metaphor stretched too far will break - but your customers may appreciate the effort you take in the meantime.

—

Just as the way you speak can use a metaphor, your branding needs a metaphor, too.

Your web site, your brochures & catalogs, and even your stationery and your shopfront - all the elements of your marketing/branding need a metaphor, too. By this I mean that all your communications to your customers need a common thread running through them that simply ‘makes sense’. There’s nothing to be gained by making the different facets of your customer communication all with different looks, qualities and styles - you’ll leave your customer with mixed messages as to the nature of your business: which end of the market are you trying to service? the value end or the premium end? or simply just a shotgun approach?

The most obvious ‘common thread’ to tie together your marketing material is to use the same look throughout. By designing your contact points with a purpose, this will at least ensure that each time your customers see you, they understand that “you’re you” - and that’s just the ante - the entry price of playing a hand of poker. By starting with a common look and feel, you’ve set the foundation for communicating your ‘higher’ message - playing the hand, to continue the poker metaphor (that’s a freebie) - which is the specific reason for your marketing in the first place.

From this base, the next step is to find a second common thread - this time, a subtle graphical metaphor that integrates all the marketing elements that your business has. When I’m designing a web site, for example, I try to find a logical and rational reason as to *why* I’m designing what I’m designing, and how it ties in with the rest of the marketing effort of the business. Sometimes, the common thread is simply a sense of refined style, and sometimes the metaphor (and the message) is simply ‘openness’ - a relaxed design style, free from clutter, to try to reflect the relaxed virtues of the business in question. But other times, the focus of the business and the products and services lend themselves to a more solid metaphor. Take this example: if you’re a property valuation company, then you don’t need to be so obvious as to use little houses on your marketing paraphernalia, but an understated concept of something using bricks and mortar could be the tie-in between your web site and your brochures and your invoice layouts. A good metaphor is even more valuable on a web site, where you can literally recreate your metaphor using prudent use of multimedia: a print brochure has to *look* like your metaphor, but a web site can *behave* like your metaphor.

Your logo stays the same throughout all your marketing: prominent and well defined - but the way you graphically plan your overall marketing concept is to help reinforce the values you want your business to be perceived by.

Your logo is seen as an important facet of your business, but in reality is simply a visual ‘mark’ or graphic that represents your business in an iconic way. Similarly, finding a good metaphor to assist the overall concept of your marketing ‘look’ also helps to represent your business in just an iconic way: it’ like the cake, and your logo is the icing on top. No, wait - the *cake* is your business, the *icing* is the metaphor that you use in your marketing that covers your business, and the *cherry* on top is your logo.

A good graphical metaphor is a subtle one: unobtrusive enough so to be subconsciously ‘accepted’; neither so ‘in your face’ as to leave nothing to the imagination; and not ‘not there at all’ - so to end up looking disjointed, or without direction and a clear end goal.

—

Everyone’s doing it, metaphorically speaking.

We all use metaphors in our day-to-day lives - and it seems that we Aussies use more than our fair share. In the end, it’s the grease on the wheel that makes our conversations flow that little bit easier.

I’d encourage you to find the right metaphor for your business - both for your verbal communications as well as for your physical ones - and see if you can hit the right note and get your customers all singing from the same songbook, if you know what I mean.

As singer David Lee Roth said: “It’s not rocket surgery”.

Uh, I guess we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

AB out