“The Metaphor Minute” is a brief monthly note with examples from business, media, or politics that illustrate the power of metaphors and analogies to make a point, solve a problem, and get results. Use these stories to stimulate high pay-off metaphoric thinking in your business.
In the December Metaphor Minute, I shared how one person uses a sand metaphor during holiday get-togethers to neutralize potential explosions with relatives who vehemently disagree with him. Now that we are in the new year and back at work, here’s a fresh metaphor to salvage a different potential relationship disaster: the irate customer with a complaint.
Latest “Metaphors That Sell” podcast and youtube interview with copywriting guru David Garfinkel. If your success depends on selling, persuasion or influencing others, check these out! https://copywriterspodcast.com/index.php?podcast=1487 https://youtu.be/5637Ujpm-uc
(Originally published in 2018, this post remains timely for your upcoming holiday get togethers.)
If the holiday season is, as the song says, the most wonderful time of the year, it can also be one of the most treacherous. Why? Because as we get together with our families, politics in these contentious times is likely to come up in discussion. Rare is the family (or group of friends) where everyone agrees on current events. So, how do you avoid turning political discussions into deeply entrenched battles that leave everyone bloodied, angry, and defiant?
(This topic is just too timely to hold for next month, so here is a second November Metaphor Minute.)
What do an obituary, an election, and a newspaper have to do with the perfect metaphor? Let me begin with the obituary…
The election is next week and all this campaigning will (finally!) be over. At rallies across the country, candidates and their allies are doubling down on why you should vote for them or for the candidate they are supporting. The messages are mind-numbingly the same: the opposing candidate is incompetent or worse and and only our candidate is your best choice. Political-speak over and over again, falling on battered, deaf ears.
But at least one speaker made the news last week with a different tack, framing a candidate’s incompetence in memorable metaphoric terms to help voters really hear and ”see” the danger of electing that guy.
How do you attract people to a field (sales) that they think has a notoriously suspect reputation? How do you turn perceptions of sales as a “pushy,” “manipulative,” and “untrustworthy” endeavor into a respectable opportunity that could launch participants into a world of respectable and lucrative work?
That was the challenge John Kratz faced in 2019 when he went after Gen Z students to enroll in the first public university sales major that he created in the state of Minnesota.
He had the university’s blessing and he had backing from Fortune 500 company 3M. Now, all he needed was the students!
How did he do it? With story and metaphor.
This month’s newsletter is as timely today for sales training as it was when it originally ran in 2014, particularly because attention and retention are harder to achieve when so many teams are remote. See how two sales trainer pros prove that metaphor power is forever!
Ever notice that in both times of joy and times of crisis we reach for metaphors to describe what is happening? (“I’m on cloud nine!” “It was a shipwreck!”) Perhaps, we do so instinctively because, by their visual nature, metaphors capture the actual as well as the emotional essence of situations in the most concise manner possible. As Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote: “The metaphor is perhaps the most fruitful power of man. Its efficacy verges on magic.”
And that “magic,” even if the metaphor is a cliche, is why they are such effective sales and communication tools.
Here is a current illustration of a crisis calling forth such metaphors:
Giving advice about how to live or how to succeed in business, can often, for various reasons, fall on deaf ears as “yeah, yeah, yeah.” However, add a metaphorical punch to that advice and watch what happens! Here are three pieces of routine advice delivered in a way to turn “yeah, yeah, yeah” into “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Challenge: How do you make dry, technical explanations or serious strategic recommendations resonant and memorable beyond the basic facts so that people will feel the way you want them to feel and/or take action after listening to you? One solution: Use compelling closing metaphors to wrap up your point. Here are three examples.
What do you spend your marketing time thinking about? When you ask life insurance marketing guru Lynn Lavender that question, she’ll tell you she spends a lot of time trying to create compelling social media posts. She knows that compelling posts strengthen her brand and help bring in business. How does she make them compelling?
“I think of creative analogies and then create a graphic that reinforces that analogy or metaphor.”
The sources for Lynn’s metaphors and analogies are all around her (and us). You just have to make the connections between them and your content. Lynn’s examples below may inspire you to do the same for your business.