Cards Against Humanity is more than only a game if you ask me — it led to an epiphany that formed just how my company developed its product story around content personalization. If you think about it, handmade cards Against Mankind and personalizing content are similar actions remarkably. Both need you to know your audience members, know very well what resonates with them, and deliver another message.

Both also build as time passes: a message that works at the start may need to evolve to remain relevant. In Cards Against Humanity, the individual who provides the most interesting experience over multiple rounds wins. In business, the company that regularly engages its audience succeeds. Before I retraced my thinking, our company struggled to communicate what personalization meant in our industry.

References to personalization almost always referred to either commence or transformation rate optimization, and everyone wanted to discuss the greatness of Netflix and Amazon. While CRO may be relevant to our customers, ecommerce is, so the B2C construct didn’t hold water for all of us. We found ourselves explaining what our product wasn’t more than what it was — a content-driven experience that liberates brands from the confines of one-size-fits-all information structures.

With just a little inspiration from Cards Against Humanity, we could actually inform a content personalization store that individuals easily understood. Continue reading to find out how we did this, and how your brand can use an analogy to inform your product tale effectively, as well. Cards Against Humanity became more than an inspiration for all of us; it became a metaphor for our product tale.

With a straightforward analogy, we changed convoluted explanations in what we do into something people could immediately understand. Conversations which were once frustrating became absurdly easy: “Ever play Cards Against Humanity? You know how you have to learn what people respond to if they are wanted by you to pick your card?

1. What is your daily life dream
2. New York, New York: $55,959 – $79,751
3. UI/UX designer
4. Sport, team, athlete and event marketing in the web 2.0 era
5. Color T.V. technology has shut the business of black and white T.V
6. Sales Rank: #897143 in Books
7. 40 Percent of Small Businesses Have Had CASHFLOW Issues In the last Year
8. 11 Michigan $50,000 $131,000 162%

People immediately recognized our company and were eager to learn more. Sales pitches that took several minutes were reduced to 1 effective phrase once. When we advertised at conferences, people flocked to our booth to try out our customized expansion deck of Cards Against Humanity (appropriately named Marketers Avoid Calamity). Industry influencers offered us shout-outs on interpersonal media. Most importantly, this new approach got us one of our biggest clients, a Fortune 500 software company. Our association with the game was all about disrupting perceptions of personalization. To dispel personalization’s longstanding association with ecommerce, we needed a genuine way to tell our tale with brevity and clarity.

Cards Against Humanity allowed us to use something familiar and fun to clarify what we should imply by personalization. The ironic beauty of Cards Against Humanity is that it’s not all that personal. Every deck of cards is exactly the same. The unique combinations of cards It’s, and the personalized uses of those cards among players, which makes the difference. My company’s experience with Cards Against Humanity is special to us, but it’s not the only path to tell a simple, effective product story.

Other brands can do the same by carrying out a few basic steps. One smart way to tell something tale is to tap into the charged power of analogy. We used a straightforward card game to clarify our complex business, and folks immediately understood what we meant. Many brands make an effort to use analogies for this function, but their attempts don’t always endure.

The key is to recognize something familiar and easily recognized, which allows your audience to easily connect the dots in the middle of your example and your business. In his publication, “Winning the story plot Wars,” Jonah Sachs identifies three-tale elements that catch audience attention: freaks, cheats, and familiars. In our case, we leveraged familiars by using an analogy that helped our audience arrive at the designed understanding on their own. Pick something that works for your brand, and find ways to make it your own then. Infuse your brand’s personality into the analogy.