METAPHORS AS BRIDGES

Ford’s famous words point to a simple truth: people can’t desire what doesn’t yet exist. This is why, in the early days of the automobile, some prototypes were even decorated with sculpted horse heads. To us, today, that probably seems humorous — but at the time, the metaphor was necessary. A ‘carriage without a horse’ was too strange to contemplate, so designers added the decoration to help people understand what they were seeing.

A horse’s head

New ideas enter society gradually: first they’re taken up by the innovators followed by the early adopters, then the wide majority, and finally the sceptics. Only then does a real market form. It’s a phenomenon that has come to be known as the ‘Rogers Curve’, so named after sociologist Everett Rogers, who described how innovation spreads in his book, Diffusion of Innovations.

Not that it happens to every new product. Many vanish long before passing through that curve. (Do you remember the Apple Newton? Steve Jobs may be remembered as an innovator of genius, but even he had to admit to some failures.) What the early adopters need to help them cross over from one product to another is a metaphor from the old world to make sense of it. Consider the internet, and Uber and Airbnb.

Webs and highways

When the internet emerged into the popular consciousness in the 1990s, it was an abstract concept difficult to grasp, so politicians and technologists framed it as a vast infrastructure network: the ‘Information Superhighway’. The metaphor was echoed by Tim Berners-Lee’s ‘World Wide Web’, which offered the image of a woven web traversing the globe. Today, the word ‘Cloud’ is used to describe data centres and servers; a metaphor designed to soften complexity and make the invisible feel reassuring.

Uber and Airbnb

In its early pitching stages, Uber called itself, ‘eBay for rides’. Although, at its core, the company is often described as ‘a taxi company with no cars’, one of its most appealing qualities when it first appeared was something far more familiar: fixed pricing and pre-payment. In the world of taxi rides, that felt new, even though the idea already existed in the worlds of flights, hotels, and trains. What’s surprising is not that Uber adopted it — but that the taxi industry had never done so earlier.

Similarly, Airbnb’s earliest metaphors were, ‘A friend’s home’ and, ‘A couch-surfing hotel’. Over time, as the platform shifted toward commercial use, both of them faded from us. But they, like Uber’s choice, had done their job: they’d made the unfamiliar recognisable to investors and executives.

Forgotten

Once the new product has been accepted by society, the metaphor is quickly forgotten. Automobiles no longer need horse-head ornaments. Telephone handsets don’t require ear and mouth mouldings. AI assistants are no longer cast in the role of a ‘secretary’. And the internet doesn’t have to be described as a ‘highway’ or a ‘web’.

In fact, like the horse-head ornament, metaphors eventually become quaint or even absurd in hindsight. As Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant note in User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play: ‘Once a metaphor becomes natural, we forget it was ever a metaphor at all’.

But never think it’s anything less than a very powerful tool. When shaping a fresh USP, framing a business model, or communicating innovation to people who do not yet understand it, a metaphor is more than a linguistic device. It is a creative act — one that borrows an existing structure or experience and applies it to a new domain. As I learned from personal experience.

A lesson from the past

In the early 2000s, I worked in a team where one member proposed that we create ringtone melodies as one way of demonstrating our company’s semiconductor capabilities. But the idea went nowhere because, I heard later, senior management laughed it off. They couldn’t accept a ringtone as something serious

At the time, the team was deeply frustrated, seeing this as yet another case of management’s lack of vision. But, looking back, I now see that a metaphor would have helped the higher-ups understand why a ringtone might resonate with end users. What we should have said was this:

 ‘A ringtone is a form of personification. Just as we recognise people by their voice, let’s help users recognise callers by the sound they make. Let’s give our customers the ability to customise their own unique sounds.’

Framed that way, the idea might not have sounded strange at all and the concept might have connected — not as a novelty, but as something meaningful. And genuinely useful.

The thing to remember

Is this. Metaphors create value in three distinct ways:

1.     They build bridges of understanding — explaining the new through the familiar.

2.     They enable creative leaps — transferring structure into a new context.

3.     They generate empathy — turning ideas into stories people want to believe in.

Innovation rarely fails from lack of creativity. It fails when we, the innovators, forget that people need a bridge and a guiding hand to help them across into a new world.