Extend the metaphor to make a worn-out phrase new again
Call it a cliché makeover.
Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, breathes new life into old, worn-out phrases in his 2006 letter to shareholders.
His secret: extending the original metaphor the cliché was based on. Here, he personifies Mother Nature as a real person:
“Our most important business, insurance, benefited from a large dose of luck: Mother Nature, bless her heart, went on vacation. After hammering us with hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 — storms that caused us to lose a bundle on super-cat insurance — she just vanished. Last year, the red ink from this activity turned black — very black.”
By extending the cliché “sleep easy at night” with “mattress,” Buffett gives this tired phrase new life. (Back story: Berkshire reinsured Equitas so its “names,” or underwriters, don’t have to worry about huge claims bankrupting the firm and themselves):
“Scott Moser, the CEO of Equitas, summarized the transaction neatly: ‘Names wanted to sleep easy at night, and we think we’ve just bought them the world’s best mattress.'”
A.G. Edwards also uses this technique in its “nest egg” ad series. The investment firm revives one of my least-favorite clichés by making it visual and extending it as far as it can go. One result: a Silver Anvil award.
Instead of eliminating your next cliché, see if you can take it further. By doing so, you might just resurrect it.
How can you surprise and delight readers?
Neurologists call it “the pleasure of the text,” the reward readers get from figuring out figurative language. (It can be quite a reward: If your wordplay is funny enough, your readers’ brains even deliver a little dose of dopamine.)
Bring Ann in to present Master the Art of Storytelling, a business-storytelling workshop — to your team.
There, they’ll learn to flip phrases; compress details; sub sound-alikes; list, rhyme and twist — even coin new words with free online tools that do the work for you. They’ll get inspired by some of the world’s most creative headlines. And they’ll polish their skills in a wordplay workout, with recipes from anagram to oxymoron.
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