Picture the Power of Visual Metaphors

Cleaning up bird droppings is dangerous. The website at histodisease.org sells that idea using visual metaphors. Representations of an eye, heart, and lungs have flocks of birds populating branches. The one for the eye, pictured here, carries the text, “Bird droppings can lead to a fungal infection that gets in the eye and can cause blindness…. Visit histodisease.org.”
     Among the most effective devices for introducing ideas and items to consumers are metaphors and similes. “This new item will be a jet pack for your success” is a metaphor. “This new item will be like a jet pack for your success” is a simile. Because of the stronger thrust of the metaphor wording, it’s usually more persuasive.
     As long as the meaning is clear to the consumer, a visual metaphor is more persuasive yet. There are two reasons for this. First, images are remembered better than words. Keep adding incidental details to verbal descriptions and soon some of the important elements are forgotten. Keep adding incidental details to images, and those extras actually enhance memory for the important elements.
     The second reason visual metaphors are more persuasive than verbal metaphors is that visual information usually enters the consumer’s brain below the level of conscious awareness, avoiding mobilization of the consumer’s resistances.
     The operating principle behind you using metaphors is that it helps the new idea or item feel like an old friend. Meeting new people—as well as new products and new concepts—can be absolutely stimulating. Consumers seek novelty and variety. Still, most consumers also find a special comfort in being with the familiar.
     Consumer psychologists talk about “the mere exposure effect.” Shoppers tend to have more favorable attitudes toward something they’ve seen before. Southern Methodist University researchers lied to study participants in telling them the participants had seen brands previously. The people who were convinced they had seen the brands before showed the same sorts of favorable attitudes as if they actually had.
     I don’t advocate lying to your customers. So instead, when introducing a new product or brand, in ads, signage, and face-to-face selling, work in phrases like, “…the same way as with the brand you’re accustomed to using…,” and “…once you do this a few times, it will be as second nature to you as what you’ve been doing up to now….”
     And when it would make sense, also show them the similarity so it’s visual.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more: 
Clock Customer Actions to Fit Time Metaphors 
Introduce Unfamiliar Products Like Old Friends