课程: Master Your Content and Communication: Nano Tips with Jon Youshaei
Creating memorable metaphors
Metaphors are one of the most powerful ways to explain unfamiliar ideas by connecting them with familiar ones. But most people use the most boring metaphors possible, like the rent skyrocketed, or don't ignore the elephant in the room. So how do you come up with more memorable metaphors for your messages? Well, just use this five-step process, which I'll walk you through with an example. So let's say The Economist, one of the world's top publications, comes to you and says, "All right. I want you to write a landing page for our new mobile app, which aggregates articles from The Economist into short daily summaries." So your task, how would you go about writing that landing page? Well, let's use the five-step process to come up with a good metaphor. Step 1: Define the new thing. Step 1 is easy. Just define the thing that you're talking about in the simplest terms. So for this example, we know that the app provides a daily summary of The Economist articles. Step 2: Identify the To - From shifts. Let me explain. In Step 2, we must identify the change that people feel after using that thing, using the app. What's the negative to positive change? For example, those who use this app will turn from uninformed to educated, from feeling behind to feeling ready, from narrow-minded to worldly. You could just go down this exercise and make a list of two and from shifts. Now, Step 3: Identify other things with the same To - From shift. Ask yourself, what else takes people from uninformed to educated? The answer may be professors or classrooms. What else takes you from feeling behind to feeling ready? The answer may be coffee or hitting the gym. What else helps you go from narrow-minded to worldly? The answer may be traveling or Lonely Planet books. Now, keep all of those in mind and you could continue brainstorming as we go to Step 4: Pick the best comparison. Now, of all of these comparisons I think that coffee works best when describing the app. The other ones don't feel as strong, which is okay, because you have to brainstorm a ton, but like the app, coffee is a daily habit that makes people feel ready to tackle the day. And Step 5 is my favorite part: You make your metaphor more powerful by weaving together other elements of your comparison word, in our case, coffee. For example, you could say, "The Economist App is a short of daily news. It energizes you with a blend of the top news stories that you could finish in less than five minutes. See what I did there with all the different elements of coffee and the app. And fun fact, The Economist actually did this. They created this very app and named it The Economist Expresso. It got millions of downloads from folks who now consume the news every morning like they do a cup of joe. So now you could apply this same five-step process to your message idea or brand, and you'll be amazed at how much easier even the most complicated things become to explain.
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