 Here at Copel Communications, we do a lot of writing. But a picture is still worth a thousand words. We craft a lot of creative concepts, too, involving visuals, which are typically handed off to talented artists and designers.
This is where visual metaphors often come into play, and we love them. So much so that we’re devoting this article to them. Show me a story A metaphor is really a verbal construct. It’s when one word is used as a symbol for something else. (“Love is a rose.”) Again, words. If you look up “metaphor” in your thesaurus, you’ll get some decidedly “verbal” synonyms, such as “figure of speech,” “word painting,” and “word picture.” Whatever. More interesting is how you, as a creative professional, can use a metaphor visually. Where one thing stands in for something else. Or how you can be “literal” with your visuals, combining or juxtaposing elements that, in the real world, would never be combined or juxtaposed. Yet when you force that combination upon the viewer, bang, there’s synergy. (If you do it right, of course.) And that’s stuff that we love (again, when it’s done right). Put it in its place We developed creative campaigns for a company that served a large community. They were a private concern, yet funded by taxpayer dollars, providing an essential service. (That’s as much as we can divulge safely here.) We were tasked with creating a pride/public awareness campaign for them. So the thinking went like this:
Thus the campaign. You certainly think of those trucks as they drive through your neighborhood. But did you know that this company also does outreach to local schools? That it serves wealthy and poorer neighborhoods alike? So what if you saw those familiar trucks... in unfamiliar settings? Mind you, the truck is branded with the company’s logo; it’s unmistakable. So what if you saw it, parked... inside a kindergarten classroom? Atop a wealthy lawn in an affluent neighborhood? At the park? The images would be (purposely) jarring... at first. But then, within seconds, they’d make sense. “Oh, of course,” you’d think. “(Company) is part of the landscape. Part of the community.” It’s hard to connect them so inseparably with words. With images, it’s instant. It’s visceral. We did another creative campaign for this same client, along similar lines. What, we asked, are the essential elements that everyone needs? The answers are easy: Air, water, food, life, safety, security, and so on. So what if you depicted a visual/iconographic matrix of those elements... and simply added (Company) into the mix? You’re forcing the viewer to make the connection. Personification Personification represents an entire subset of visual metaphors. We worked on a creative campaign for a regional cancer center, in which the visual metaphor was arrestingly simple: We opted to personify cancer. The reasoning went like this: People are afraid of cancer. But what if cancer were afraid of (Regional Cancer Center)? That’s an interesting spin. Of course, you can’t see cancer. Not in real life. But in Ad Land, you can. Because you can personify it. The same way that Allstate famously personified “Mayhem” with its character who loves to trash your home and your car (underscoring your need for the services of Allstate). Cancer is a serious subject. You don’t want some cutesy actor portraying it. So you could just have a menacing pair of eyes... a shadow... just enough to walk the line between seen and unseen. A deep well We love visual metaphors because opportunities to employ them always crop up sooner or later. And there are always new ways to use them, to get creative, to make something that’s at once visually arresting and on-message. Need help with this kind of creative concepting? Contact us. We’d love to tackle that assignment for you.
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 How much do you know about Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt?
FUD is a great acronym; not enough people know it. It stands for “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.” We learned this one years ago while working for consultants in the defense, intel, and national-security spaces: "Let's lay a little FUD on the customer about the prospect of leaving the incumbent for a prime contractor who hasn’t done this before.” Isn’t it wonderful? FUD. It’s great. It’s useful. In this article, we’re going to discuss some ways to employ FUD to your advantage, to grow your business. We’ll also spotlight some instances in which you shouldn’t use FUD, based on a recent experience of ours. Creative FUD FUD, properly employed—and in this case, we’re talking about a marketing/business-development usage—will subtly get under the prospect’s skin. It’s akin to FOMO—Fear of Missing Out—but it’s much more powerful. It plays upon their deepest fears. Your message, of course, is “Avoid FUD by working with us.” The title of this article is “FUD for Executives,” so let’s discuss that. As a consultant/business owner, you love to target execs. They’re decision-makers. They command the strategic initiatives. They own the purse-strings. They’re also, generally, pretty confident people. You don’t rise to the apex of the organization by being timid or insecure. Yet they still have insecurities. They’re not psychopaths. Indeed, many successful execs are so good at what they do because they can balance gut-wrenching risk with reward; it’s part of the entrepreneurial mindset. They want to take that leap. (Yes, yes, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. There are lily-livered executives out there who rise by nepotism, and thrive on the status quo. Let ‘em. They’re not our target. They wouldn’t budge if a tectonic plate split right beneath their feet.) Our point, as far as executives go, when it comes to FUD, is to be subtle about it. These people are smart. You don’t have to tell them: “You’ll fail! The competition will eat your lunch if you don’t do this/buy our stuff!” That’s an instant turn-off. We’re currently working on a campaign for a startup, aimed at executives, which includes a component of FUD as part of its hook. We can’t get into the details here (they’re client confidential), but the messaging goes something like this: “Have you considered all aspects of your business’ [targeted] strategy? Would you feel comfortable if what you’re doing right now became known to your stakeholders, your shareholders, and the world?” Oooh. That’ll make ‘em squirm. But again, don’t dwell on it. Move, quickly, to the high road. Talk up the to-be world you’re pitching to these execs; that’s what you’re selling, after all. To FUD or not to FUD We recently worked on a client assignment in which the customer was wrongly characterized. Mind you, this is huge. This violates every iota of customer-back-ness that we preach, and practice, here at Copel Communications. In this instance, our client’s target customer was businesses that provide a luxury experience to their end-users. Our client, initially, and mistakenly, conflated the two: They assumed that their prospect wanted the same luxury experience that they intended to deliver to their own customers. Nothing could be further from the truth. These prospects were shrewd businesspeople who wanted great service and value from their vendors—which is, effectively, what our client was. Offering them “luxury” would be off-putting. It would seem callously overpriced and tone-deaf. Indeed, this audience—the businesses that offer luxury to their customers—was ripe for a dosage of FUD. That’s because our client offered them something that would, among other things, keep them out of legal hot water. That’s a huge selling point. A great FUD opening. And we were able to effectively torpedo any vestiges of the “luxury” pitch to this audience with the following analogy: Years ago, we wrote materials for one of the most exclusive properties of one of the most exclusive hotel chains in the country. And we never wrote: “Stay at Luxury Hotel. You won’t get any bedbugs here, like you would elsewhere!” Of course not. You don’t ever, ever employ FUD in a luxury context like that. Ergo, our business audience for our client was not a “luxury” audience. Using FUD on them (“Avoid legal hot water”) was wholly appropriate. So when do you use it? FUD is context-sensitive. It depends on what your prospect is fearing (or uncertain or doubtful of), along with what you’re offering them—and how that tees up with their underlying dilemma. It needs to be teased out subtly, especially for higher-end (read: “exec”) audiences. You can certainly bash them over the head in, say, a hard-sell retail advertising environment, but that’s not what we’re focusing on here. Much of this arises from taking a customer-back approach in the first place. That is, starting with your target customer’s pain points, and working backward to the messaging (and even the solution) you’ll offer. Need help crafting a nice “FUDDY” message? Contact us... or you just might fall short of your goals, LOL! |