phil
26-02-2007, 02:11 PM
A year ago I was working on a corporate conference for the marketing department of a global company. The different brand teams worldwide had been 'given' a bridge metaphor and had been encouraged (I guess) to use it to model what is important in relation to their brand.
This year I worked on the follow-up conference and we saw the results.
Each brand team had (in our language) modelled their brand using the structure of a bridge (which aspect is the 'keystone', what are the supporting pillars, etc). They had then used it to define (again in our terms) necessary conditions for creating and maintaining the bridge and thus the brand. Individual teams seemed to have prioritised different aspects of their brands yet the overall structure of the bridge fitted well in each case.
It came across as a pretty useful tool that got wide acceptance across the teams. I don't know to what extent they had been consciously aware of working in metaphor but to judge by the results there had been no special difficulty in doing so.
I wonder whether, if they had been facilitated to come up with their own metaphors for their individual brands, they might have chosen different metaphors? One brand was a laxative product...
:)
Anyone have any other examples of metaphors being deliberately used in this way in companies? Any thoughts or experiences on using Clean Language, Symbolic Modelling or any other clean approaches to work with these metaphors in business?
Phil
This year I worked on the follow-up conference and we saw the results.
Each brand team had (in our language) modelled their brand using the structure of a bridge (which aspect is the 'keystone', what are the supporting pillars, etc). They had then used it to define (again in our terms) necessary conditions for creating and maintaining the bridge and thus the brand. Individual teams seemed to have prioritised different aspects of their brands yet the overall structure of the bridge fitted well in each case.
It came across as a pretty useful tool that got wide acceptance across the teams. I don't know to what extent they had been consciously aware of working in metaphor but to judge by the results there had been no special difficulty in doing so.
I wonder whether, if they had been facilitated to come up with their own metaphors for their individual brands, they might have chosen different metaphors? One brand was a laxative product...
:)
Anyone have any other examples of metaphors being deliberately used in this way in companies? Any thoughts or experiences on using Clean Language, Symbolic Modelling or any other clean approaches to work with these metaphors in business?
Phil