I have found analogies are the easiest way start-up companies communicate who they are.

Analogies are even a great way to communicate industry trends too (Ryan Spoon from Polaris Ventures uses analogies to discuss the difference between SEO and SGO here). Also, in this video, Bob Metclafe uses the “history of the internet” as a rubric to explain what advances need to occur in the clean-tech space.

Here’s the thing, it sounds easy to create an analogy, doesn’t it? It’s not, but if you find one that works, it’s a great way to communicate who you are in less than 15s.

Let me first go through the different analogies I hear in start-up corporate marketing messages:

1. We are X of/for Y. (e.g Flixup is the Rotten Tomatoes for Twitter, SocialMedia.com is creating the DoubleClick of the Social Web).  I’m a big fan of this, it’s simple, if you attach yourself to something mainstream enough.
2. We are X #.0. (e.g Mint is Quicken 2.0).  This is not as helpful because the term 2.0 is overly inflated but also doesn’t answer the question “how are you better”
3. We are X meets Y meets Z (e.g Foursquare is Social Network meets GPS meets Game).  **Foursqure doesn’t position themselves this way, they call themselves a location-based social network** The x+y+z only works, in my mind, if you’re communicating a fairly abstract idea that’s really new.  The challenge is that people will still be royally confused about who are you, since you’re a bit of everything. (I generally find people who speak x+y+z don’t know who they are quite yet)

When I worked at Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff used analogies to communicate a new product message all the time.  One of the most common methods was to use consumer product concepts and bring them to the enterprise.  That was his whole thing.  Here are some of them (not exactly in his words, but some derivative)

• SaaS/On-Demand Software - “In the same way you can access your email online, you should be able to access your CRM from anywhere.  It needs to be that simple.  Access it anywhere at anytime.” Marc uses the ease of accessing email as an analogy to communicate how it should be easy to access your accounts & contacts.
• AppExchange - “The AppExchange is the iTunes of the Enterprise.  We made it that simple.  Go to appexchange.com, browse all these great enterprise solutions, and like iTunes, download it to your org.  No software, no installations.”.  To make the message really simple, use something everyone is familiar with, Here is an article.
• Salesforce Chatter - “In the same way that you have your Twitter feed and your Facebook feed, Salesforce Chatter is your enterprise real-time feed.”  Salesforce Chatter is a real-time social network for the enterprise.

This worked for Salesforce and for 100s of companies, but here are some caveats about using analogies in the “who-you-are” conversation:

• Your analogy must contain a fairly mainstream company.  For instance, suppose you used Blippy in your company analogy.  Not enough people know who Blippy actually is - why even use it?   It might be helpful to communicate to people who understand the service but as part of a larger marketing story, it won’t be effective.
• The analogy needs to be 100% obvious.  I advised a company focused on field service management.  The simplest way to communicate who they were was to say “We’re the Salesforce.com of Field Service Management”.  People got it.  It was 100% obvious.  (They never used that positioning for other reasons, but I still vouch for it).
• Keep the analogy simple.  I’m not a fan of the we’re X+Y+Z.  That’s basically saying, you don’t know who you are and then the listening party is confused who are you more like, X, Y, or Z?
• Know your audience.  When we created flixup!, we wanted to be the “Lifestream for movies.  We surface the movie conversations from all your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, etc) “.  10% of the people that I spoke to knew what I was talking about.  Lifestrea, though it was part of AOL, was not mainstream enough, and wasn’t resonating well.  We had to make it more attached to “how people decide what movies watch” - we started using Rotten Tomatoes in our analogy.

When your company name is part of the analogy, you must be doing something right.   That means you’re mainstream and simple to understand.

NOTE: We don’t have all the answers and we are still trying to figure out who we are and identifying the analogies that best define us.  Hopefully one day, we’ll be part of the analogy!