Marketing Innovation: Pants on Fire and the Metaphor Tool

Insurance companies continue to battle it out as the industry emerges from the global financial crisis.  They are spending huge sums on national advertising to establish brand loyalty and earn trust.  But consumers have a hard time distinguishing between the many undifferentiated insurance products.  They tend to shop on price as a result.  So insurance advertisers have to walk a fine line acknowledging the importance of price while slipping in their value propositions around service and other features.

1. Unification
2. Activation
3. Metaphor
4. Subtraction
5. Extreme Consequence
6. Absurd Alternative
7. Inversion
8. Extreme Effort

The trick is to do it in a non-obvious, clever way.  The process is called fusion, and there are three versions:  Metaphor fused to Product/Brand, Metaphor fused to Message, and Metaphor fused to both the Product/Brand and Message.  Here is an example metaphor fused to the message:

If you are not sure what happened here, you probably need to know that “Liar Liar Pants On Fire” is a playground taunt that kids use whenever they think the other is lying.  Fibbing is naughty, and “pants on fire” is a euphemism for spanking.  This commercial does a nice job of highlighting Progressive’s value proposition of “helpfulness and transparency” while dissing the competition. “No mas pantalones.”

Flo, herself, is a metaphor of the helpful retail sales person on the floor of an imaginary “insurance department store.”  Flo, played by actress Stephanie Courtney, is the brand personified, and Huffington Post describes why we love her:

“Flo steals your heart as easily as Cupid shoots an arrow on Valentine’s Day, whether she’s talking about her tricked-out name tag, or ardently pointing out ways Progressive can insure anything you own, tailored to your specifics. And she can fist bump a customer with her pricing gun as easily as John Wayne drew his Colt 45. Fans follow her on Twitter, FaceBook and MySpace; not a shy lot, they often leave love notes which can be read by anyone, even Stephanie Courtney.”

In the clutter of so many insurance commercials, the metaphor, Flo, stands above the rest.