Since I am already on my commercial soapbox, I might as well continue with the discussion of the 20 year advertising war between Mac and PC. This is a Mac driven war and, to give the company credit, it has generated some great commercials. An amazing number of these commercials rely on analogy to communicate the superiority of the Mac to the PC.
The first of these commercials was the 1984 “Big Brother” commercial. It is considered to be a groundbreaking commercial by many in the advertising industry.
Beautiful! The analogy? That PC clones created a clone-like hive mentality with Big Brother IBM setting the standards for a monotonous and bleak computer experience. Ground-breaking, liberated, unique Macs would save us from this and bring color back into our world.Subsequent Mac vs PC commercials over the intervening years continued this theme using a range of analogies to communicate the superiority of the MAC over the PC. For example, the analogy of the PC Intel Pentium II chip to a snail:
And this one comparing the PC 2000 bug to 2001: Space Odessey’s HAL:
What I haven’t liked are the current slew of MAC vs PC commercials, mainly because the analogy doesn’t hold up for me. Now don’t take me wrong. I like both Macs and PCs. I’ve used both over the years and think they are equally useful, each in their own way. The reason the analogy in the new set of commercials doesn’t work for me is that the idea being communicated by the commercials through a variety of analogies (the bloated PC commercial, the PC that can’t speak to the Japanese “camera” commercial, etc) is that Macs are “fun” and PCs are for work. My experiences with both is that it is just the opposite. Most MAC users I know are in the arts or advertising and they appear to spend all their time slaving at their computers. If they want to play, there are precious few games they can play with. The “fun stuff” pushed by Mac just appears to be tools for artistic professionals to do their jobs. Kind of sad.This is actually relevant to the use of analogy for communication. By using an analogy to tap into user’s existing knowledge, you tap into ALL of that knowledge. This is actually one of the problems with using analogy to communicate and why it is so important to choose the correct analogy to describe an innovation or to make a point. All the conceptual baggage comes packaged in an analogy – the good with the bad. By activating that knowledge in the audience, you run the risk of them making some unwanted inferences (should any exist). In my case, the knowledge of how Mac users actually use Macs runs counter to the message implied in the commercials and just rubs me the wrong way.
This is not a good way to win friends and influence people.
The clip below illustrates one of the current Mac vs PC ads for those unfamiliar with the commercials just discussed: