The Chocolate Bunny

I’m a fan of metaphor as a shortcut for expressing concept in brainstorming and general operational conversations, and I came up with this one a number of years ago. The Chocolate Bunny has done a lot of heavy lifting for me in business discussions over the years.

The concept is simple: the chocolate bunny is made of delicious chocolate, but once you bite into it, you find that it’s hollow inside.

The first application was in reference to a website that we were evaluating. We realized that although it was beautifully designed, and took great advantage of the then state of the art in technology, it had absolutely nothing to say. For all of the skill and effort put into the superficial package, there was no content…a chocolate bunny of a website.

From there, I discovered that there were chocolate bunny companies—nice logo, great offices, no business plan. Even people, sad to say, could be aptly described that way—think of the sales rep with a great beginning, but no follow-through, or worse, great skills, but with no solid product to sell.

I’ve used it as a management tool to help encourage design staff to stay current with technology: “You don’t want to be a chocolate bunny—you’re going to have to keep up to speed with Action Script to keep your career going.” It’s also another way to describe vaporware; software with a strong press release, and maybe even a logo, but no release candidate.

There’s even an advanced application of the metaphor that brings in another axis: that the chocolate bunny is not only hollow, but what looks like delicious chocolate is actually pretty bad mass-produced chocolate. If I remember correctly, I’ve even worked the concept of eating the bunny’s ears first into a business context.

The world is full of metaphors, but this one’s my favorite, and I’m able to apply it in a variety of situations. Baseball metaphors are the utility player of conversation (you see what I did there?) but I think that it’s possible that the chocolate bunny might be nearly as useful. Prove me wrong, and I’ll freely admit that my argument is hollow.

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