Getting your ideas into people’s mental door

Nametags are my favorite accessory, but also my favorite analogy.

If there is a particular idea, story or experience that needs to be conveyed in an interesting and persuasive way, my default linguistic tool is to refer to it as a nametag.

If an idea is sticky and playful and human and disarming, that’s a nametag.

If there is a person who makes a small, simple effort to connect with new people in an unexpected way, that’s a nametag.

If a business is differentiating itself with a vulnerable, transparent approach that brings customers peace or joy or curiosity, that’s a nametag.

This analogy has been incredibly useful over the years for communicating ideas to clients, colleagues, the media and prospective business partners and collaborators. By taking something from their world and comparing it to a nametag, it’s easier and faster for me to get my ideas into people’s mental door.

What’s your version of that? Do you have a unique analogy chambered and ready to go for when you need to make your messages stick?

Scott Adams, perhaps the most successful cartoonist in modern history, is the master of giving names to things. Not only in his comics, but also in his books, speeches and other media.

And for good reason, too. Adams explains in his most recent book that humans give greater weight to things that have names. It’s much easier to describe what we want if we use a word that exists in their common vocabulary.

One that people already have a sense of. Naming things can weaponize them. Behold, the beauty of analogies in communication.

When we give names to universal laws or ideas that already exist, our message sticks.

When we figure out what idea is already in our audience’s head, and then hang our idea right next to, our message sticks.

We don’t actually have to discover a new phenomenon, we just have to formulate that phenomenon with a label people won’t forget.

And do will we know when we’ve succeeded? How do we know when the concepts we’ve exposed people to have become part of their thinking?

Simple. When they start adopting our language.

Just ask my friends, family members, coworkers and clients. Most of them, at some point in our relationship, have used the word nametag to communicate something other than a literal nametag.

And every time it happens, a little dancing smile of satisfaction paints across my heart.

Someone in my life will notice something in the world, take a picture of it, and send it to me with a caption that reads, it’s just like a nametag!

Mission accomplished. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What’s your favorite analogy?