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.
Here is an example from the long-running Progressive campaign featuring the lovable character, Flo. It uses the metaphor tool. The Metaphor is the most commonly used tool in marketing communications because it is a great way to attach meaning to a newly-launched product or brand. The Metaphor Tool takes a well-recognized and accepted cultural symbol and manipulates it to connect to the product, brand, or message.
The tool is one of eight patterns embedded in most innovative commercials. Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues describe these simple, well-defined design structures in their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” and provide a step-by-step approach to using them. The tools are: