Words: Adam Ketterer – Founder
Category(s): Branding, Positioning
Date: 1st November 2023
At school we’re taught that metaphor is a figure of speech that can help us make powerful rhetorical statements and conjure up vivid poetic images. What we’re not taught (or at least I wasn’t) is just how fundamentally useful metaphor is as an everyday tool for cognition and communication.
Without metaphors, we wouldn’t understand much about the world. And what we did understand, we wouldn’t be able to talk about.
So when we’re working on a B2B positioning and messaging project at Beneath, we think about how metaphor can help us capture the essence of a company’s story or a product’s value in a fresh, intuitive, compelling way. Instead of spending paragraphs explaining what a technology does for a prospect, we try to shed light on its value more quickly and effectively with what we call a brand’s Illuminating Metaphor.
(And yes, for the purposes of this post I am grouping all kinds of metaphor, simile, analogy, etc under one metaphorical umbrella.)
The Illuminating Metaphor
Metaphors are everywhere in B2B tech marketing – because they’re everywhere full stop. (What do love and enterprise software have in common? They’re both hard to explain without metaphor.)
Next time you’re surfing the web on your tablet, being served cookie-based ads inviting you to dive into an ebook about breaking down data silos using cloud computing, or using an AI co-pilot chatbot to report a spammy phishing email… take a moment to think about how many metaphors you encounter.
The jargon and coded language of marketing itself is rife with metaphors too: funnels, gates, leads, churn. If a metaphor enters common use, there’s a good chance it’ll be doomed to clichédom, or become one of the many dead or dormant metaphors we barely notice even when we use them.
But every now and again you hear a topic explained with a metaphor and it’s like someone flicked on a light switch. They made the idea click into place. [Insert your favourite Eureka-moment metaphor here.]
When they’re used well, metaphors are the ultimate hack for intuitive shorthand sensemaking that sticks in the mind.
So they can be your most powerful tool when it matters most: in company or brand positioning and in the messaging you use, either as the core idea or as a supporting image.
That’s what we mean by the Illuminating Metaphor.
Not every company uses an Illuminating Metaphor in a deliberate way, but they probably have one (or more than one) getting thrown around by their leadership, product, sales or marketing teams – or by their customers – to explain something important.
Here are some of our favourite examples of Illuminating Metaphors we’ve seen in the wild, and in our client work.
Examples of Illuminating Metaphors in B2B marketing
When process mining leaders Celonis set out* to explain what their technology does for customers, they framed it as an X-ray of your business that gives you an accurate, objective visualisation of your processes and of opportunities to improve them.
*Over time, as the tech grew more powerful and multidimensional, Celonis evolved this X-ray metaphor into an MRI of your business.
(Note also that process mining, the broader category of tech that Celonis pioneers, is itself a neat metaphor.)
Payments infrastructure company Stripe have stated that their mission is to increase the GDP of the internet – a metaphor I love because it asks the reader to make just a small notional leap to think of the internet as a nation state, and of Stripe as an ambitious treasurer in charge of its growth.
Engagio (acquired by DemandBase) pioneered Account-based marketing (ABM) in B2B several years ago. To educate the market about what was still a fairly new practice at the time, they used a metaphor: ABM is like fishing with spears instead of nets. I can’t be sure of the origins of this particular Illuminating Metaphor but I suspect it may have come from Engagio founder Jon Miller or from Doug Kessler, CD at their agency at the time (a man who can balance poetry, prophesy, profanity and prospecting in a single well-chosen metaphor).
Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet. Perfect.
VC firm Andreessen Horowitz summed up its thesis – and defined an era – when it said software is eating the world.
Product categories are often coined with metaphors: you’ve got supply chain control towers. (Hey, I just noticed supply chain is one.) And data clean rooms. You might form your own company in a startup incubator.
I tried to think of a metaphor about Software as a Service, before I realised the whole thing is formulated as a metaphor: software = a service.
Sometimes company names contain fitting metaphors. Data onboarding (the act of transferring offline customer data to online environments so you can use it for marketing) is a big part of what LiveRamp does. So the image of a live ramp works pretty well.
The name Plaid evokes criss-crossing fabric patterns – a nice image for an API connectivity company.
What makes a good Illuminating Metaphor?
If the examples above don’t get your metaphorical juices flowing freely enough, here are some tips to help you find your own Illuminating Metaphor. The most successful ones are:
- Simple – The main goal of the Illuminating Metaphor is understanding, so don’t make your audience think too hard. And please don’t mix your metaphors (or stumble into malaphor).
- Concrete – Specificity and tangibility help. That’s why “1000 songs in your pocket” is better than “5GB in your hard drive.”
- Relatable – Don’t make obscure references. In some cases, domain-specific metaphors might signal that you understand your audience’s niche world, but in general it’s best to keep things universal.
- Desirable – It sounds obvious, but make sure you’re drawing a positive comparison, or at least that the thing you’re likening your product or company to isn’t going to invite unpleasant associations. (Unless negative connotations are the whole point, as in the metaphor of the computer virus.)
- Surprising – If your metaphor feels simultaneously surprising and obvious, like it was under your nose the whole time, you know you’ve hit on something great.
- Ownable – You want to find a comparison that’s original enough to become an ownable idea. That’s why I’m not so keen on Salesforce’s “metaphor marketing” – like calling a solution “Amazon for X” or “iTunes for Y.” For me, Amazon and iTunes are the real winners there, not X or Y.
- Adaptable – Product and company positionings aren’t static, so the way you communicate them has to evolve over time too. If your Illuminating Metaphor can adapt with you (like that Celonis example where the X-ray became the MRI) then you can build more of that conceptual equity over time.
If you want some themes to explore in your metaphor-making, here you go. There are seven types of deep metaphor according to Gerald Zaltman, who studies the framing devices and mental images consumers use, knowingly and unconsciously, to understand the world and express their feelings (check out the ZMET technique).
- Balance
- Journey
- Transformation/change
- Container
- Connection
- Resource
- Control
Why Illuminating Metaphors are so powerful
Ultimately, marketers are in the persuasion business. In B2B tech marketing, we often need to take a complex topic and make it simple, interesting, desirable and motivating – and we only have about 1.5 thumb-scrolls of time to do it. You can’t beat metaphor for speed and effectiveness there.
And it’s not just about reason and understanding, but emotional impact too. When we use a metaphor, the “source domain” we choose affects the way our audience thinks and feels about the “target domain”. For example, one study found that when people were told crime (target domain) was a “beast (source domain) preying on” the city, they proposed punitive solutions like long jail time. On the other hand, those who were told crime was a “virus infecting” the city opted for more curative, reformative measures.
Create your own
An Illuminating Metaphor can explain what your company or product does, so people understand you better. It can cross-pollinate notions and feelings from the source concept to your brand, so you benefit from that halo effect. And it can make your ideas intuitive, sticky and more likely to be shared.
A metaphor on its own doesn’t make a company or product positioning, but an Illuminating Metaphor can do a lot of the hard work for you.