​Some concepts are hard to convey. If you toil in the creative trenches, you can be tasked with presenting (and thus selling) ideas like love, or comfort, or peace of mind. Similarly, you might need to depict something malicious that can’t be seen: a disease. Or you might need an entirely new visual spin on something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer.
 
There’s a common go-to solution for all of these creative dilemmas: Personification. It’s a term you learned in fourth-grade English class to explain how an author used it to bring something like a natural force (fire, thunderstorm) to life in the reader’s mind. It’s a literary device that’s been around forever; think of how “Awful Beauty puts on all its arms” in Pope’s “The Rape of The Lock.” And that was in 1712.
 
But we digress. 
 
Sure, you can employ personification in the written form, in copy. But copy requires “diving in” on the part of the audience; it’s not immediately apparent. Aside from, perhaps, a headline, it doesn’t grab the way visual elements do. 
 
What looks like a person?
 
There are plenty of great examples here, both from our own experience and from well-known campaigns. We’ll start with the former, and work our way to the latter. 
 
In case you’re not up on your latest enterprise technology, there’s a hot new thing out there called robotic process automation which, despite its cool name, is basically just a souped-up computer macro that spans more applications than just, say, Excel. 
 
We had a client that was able to use this tech to actually pull information from corporate directories and Excel sheets, and then draw a process map from it in Microsoft Visio. That’s really impressive. But how do you market it? 
 
In this case, it was personification—and more specifically, anthropomorphism—to the rescue. Our graphic designer on this project created an adorable character of a cartoon “artist” robot, replete with paintbrush, smock, and beret. You see the bot holding the paintbrush, you see the gorgeous process map he’d created, sitting on its little cartoon easel... the thing barely even needs a headline. 
 
Another: We were working with a hospital client, and they wanted to promote their new cancer-treatment center. And one of the campaign concepts we presented to them personified cancer.
 
Granted, this is a delicate subject. You don’t want the over-the-top monstrous allergen you may have seen in TV ads for antihistamines. So cancer could be depicted as a malicious, lurking presence. Perhaps just a pair of eyes, spying for an evil opportunity. Or it could be there, without even being shown, borrowing from the style of classic horror movies by Val Lewton such as “Cat People.” 
 
Going big
 
Two of the best examples of personification that come to mind are from national TV campaigns: one old, the other still ongoing. 
 
The old one was for what we’d mentioned in the intro: “something that’s pretty mundane and familiar, such as, say, a desktop computer.” Depicting a gray box isn’t very exciting; it’s what you can do with it that makes it exciting. Or, conversely, what it can’t do (if it’s not such a great computer) that makes it frustrating and annoying. 
 
Remember “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC.”? If you don’t, these were ads from Apple, aiming to show the superiority of their computers over Windows-based machines. And the brilliant thing about them was that they never showed a computer at all. There were simply two actors standing on an empty white stage. One—the hip, cool dude portrayed by Justin Long—was the Mac. The other—the pitifully unhip office wonk, portrayed by John Hodgman—was the PC. The Mac talked about, and showed, all the cool things he could do. The PC tried to do the same, and always failed, in an embarrassingly humorous way. Apple sold a lot of Macs off this campaign. 
 
The other campaign that really nails “personification” is from Allstate. You’ve just got to love their “Mayhem” character. Think about that, and how perfectly that works: A single actor, a person, portraying all the terrible things, both human-induced and acts of nature, that can screw up your life and your belongings. You don’t think of all these random evils as one single force... until you see those ads. And then you see him positioned up against Allstate, and the brand gets cemented in your mind. 
 
When to use it, or not
 
Personification, like any creative trope, is no magic bullet. It’s certainly not new. And as we’d mentioned above in our cancer-center story, you need to be careful in how you employ it; used flippantly or indelicately, it can backfire on you. 
 
But done right, personification is a great tool, just waiting for fresh new applications. Need help with it, or any creative challenge? Contact us. We’d love to help. 

​Are you scaring away the very prospects you seek to attract?
 
This is a good one. We’ll bet you’ve encountered a situation like the one we’re about to describe—specifically, an offering to your clients and prospects—and been faced with the same dilemma. 
 
This is a “silver lining” story if ever there was one. 
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
What does your business offer?
 
For this assignment, we were helping a business to launch a new brand, and its associated website. So everything was pretty much from-scratch. We’d helped our client to ideate some elements, but many others they did on their own. We—us and the client—were both working hard, and fast, to meet a set-in-stone deadline for the unveiling of the new site, and business. 
 
Then it came at us. 
 
And by “it,” we mean, the “Services” page. 
 
Okay, you’re asking: How can this become an entire blog article?
 
Even more astutely, you’re asking—you’ve been asking--What on earth does this have to do with the words “tax” and “benefit” in the title of this story?
 
Stay with us. 
 
This client gave us the raw input for writing the copy for the new business’ Services page. To our client’s credit, they endeavored to keep everything as simple as possible. We can’t divulge the details here, but suffice to say that our client was looking to “product-ize” a number of service-based offerings, and list them on the Services page under five different categories, or tiers, of offerings. 
 
Our job, ostensibly, was simply to clean up the copy for this five-column matrix. So far, so straightforward, right? 
 
A sticky sticking point
 
This is where we saw a problem—and a huge opportunity. The input went something like this (again, we need to be fuzzy here for disclosure reasons): 
 
There were five different offerings. Well, actually, there were really only four: Four one-off service packages that this client of ours wanted to sell. 
 
Huh? 
 
What, then, was the fifth one? 
 
The fifth one, as we were told, was a requirement for any prospective client. It said that, “If you buy Services 2, 3, or 4, you also need to buy Add-On Number 5, which is a monthly maintenance package.” 
 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re smart. You’ve figured out this entire thing—including the teaser words “tax” and “benefit” in our headline—already. Haven’t you? 
 
Don’t worry. We’ll spell it all out anyway. 
 
Here’s the thing: Our client wanted to—and had every right to—demand that their new clients who signed up for Tiers 2, 3, and 4, should also sign up for Add-On Number 5: the monthly-maintenance package. This is because the actual baseline offerings of Tiers 2, 3, and 4 were pretty complicated things, and thus needed ongoing maintenance in order to function properly, and keep working as advertised. 
 
So, on that basis, it was a reasonable demand. 
 
The thing that was unreasonable, in our eyes? Demanding it. 
 
When bad becomes good
 
As soon as we saw the five columns of input, we could see not only what was wrong, but the simple way to fix it: 
 
Eliminate Add-On Number 5.
 
Done. Why list an additional charge, as some kind of requirement, some kind of tax, for something else that a customer would want to buy already? 
 
In other words, don’t force it on them as an add-on. 
 
Instead, bake it in, as a feature of Tiers 2, 3, and 4. 
 
Ta-dah. 
 
Now it’s not a tax. It’s a benefit. It’s a feature. Indeed, it’s an incentive to upgrade. 
 
Think of ordering a new car online. You’re accustomed to seeing the columns of different feature packages: Base, Upgrade, Ultimate. Same thing here. 
 
The “base” is Tier 1. You get what you get. But when you upgrade to Tier 2, not only do you get more bells and whistles, but you also get professional maintenance, month after month, to make sure you get the most out of your investment! How wonderful is that? 
 
Tiers 3 and 4 each add more features (and thus value, and thus price), and also include the monthly maintenance—again, as an added benefit.
 
This sure is making Tier 1 look pretty bare-bones by now, isn’t it? 
 
Not only that, it’s radically streamlining the “Services” page. Four columns are that much easier to digest than five, and that whole fifth column was confusing and off-putting, anyway. 
 
Take it to the bank
 
Now you know how that “Services” page ended up getting structured. The client was delighted with our suggestion, and let us run with it. 
 
This story, and our reason for telling it, extends way beyond that one client of ours, and that one offering-matrix and “Services” page. It speaks to the the panoply of value that you offer to your customers and prospects alike. It frees you from the fear of “needing to ask for more.” It enables you to make more, while making your clients even happier in the process. Everyone wins. 
 
The stumbling block, then, is perceptual. You just need to see this story—and others like it, which will confront you frequently—in the proper light. 
 
Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We solve these kinds of issues all the time.