A product benefit is a fact. A dramatised benefit is a feeling. And feelings, as every strategist knows, are significantly harder to ignore. Dramatise the Benefit turns the thing the product does into a story the audience lives through — via metaphor, exaggeration, genre, or emotional consequence. Here are 5 tactics from the Metaphor Engine that make the benefit hard to miss.
- Metaphor That Proves the Product
- Absurdist Exaggeration
- Make It Feel Like a Superpower
- Emotional Journey with a Product Twist
- Genre as the Proof
1. Metaphor That Proves the Product
Turn the benefit into a story situation — and let the analogy do the persuading.
Lightning Strike — Wallbox, David Madrid, 2022
Wallbox needed to explain safe EV charging at the Super Bowl, in a category no one was paying attention to. The brief: make a technical safety claim emotionally memorable. The answer: find a real lightning strike survivor, Seth Thomas, and let his irrational fear of electricity become the metaphor for Wallbox's reliability. He flinches at every outlet — except the Wallbox charger. Treated like a deadpan testimonial, the story lands because the metaphor is absurd and the product logic is airtight. It helped Wallbox stand out in a crowded tech category and made a complex claim both emotional and memorable. See campaign ->
Apple's HomePod 'Welcome Home' turned a dull commute and a rainy apartment into a sequence of magical realism — the benefit (transformative sound) played out through walls expanding and a woman's whole world changing shape. The benefit didn't need explaining. The metaphor showed it. When explanation kills the feeling, find the analogy that shows it instead.
2. Absurdist Exaggeration
Push the benefit to its most ridiculous possible conclusion — then keep going.
No SKYN, No Love — SKYN, UltraSuperNew, 2022
The condom category in Japan was awkward, clinical, and easy to ignore. SKYN's benefit — skin-to-skin sensation — was real, but saying it plainly wasn't going to move anyone. So the campaign showed what happens without it. In a surreal anime-style short, a couple loses connection the moment they stop using SKYN. The absurd chain reaction escalates: heartbreak, black holes, emotional ruin. The exaggeration is so extreme it becomes funny, then affecting. It gave SKYN cultural edge with Gen Z and drove real attention in a stale category. See campaign ->
Lynx's 'Robbery' had a man's scent so powerful that armed criminals dropped their weapons and swooned. The absurdity is the argument. The more outrageous the exaggeration, the more clearly the benefit is felt.
3. Make It Feel Like a Superpower
Frame the product benefit as a transformation — and let the user feel what it unlocks.
Unlock — Apple, 2018
Face ID was a technical feature in a spec-saturated category. The brief: make it feel like something people want, not just something they use. The execution: a teenage girl walks through her school and unlocks everything with her face — lockers, classrooms, vending machines exploding open in her wake. No dialogue. No spec. Just a visual superpower played completely straight. The exaggeration is the point. It made Face ID feel frictionless, almost magical, and positioned the iPhone as a device that gave you an edge over your own world. See campaign ->
HP Wolf's thriller-style cybersecurity campaign (Wieden+Kennedy, 2021) starring Christian Slater as a hacker made endpoint protection feel like the line between safety and catastrophe. easyJet's 'Get Out There' (VCCP, 2023) sent the Mona Lisa, Thinker, and Girl with the Pearl Earring escaping their frames for Europe — because the benefit of travel is liberation, and statues want it too.
