Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphor Reveal About the Minds of Consumers

THIS REVIEW CONSIDERS Marketing Metaphoria from three perspectives: the relationship to Professor

Gerald Zaltman's earlier book, How Customers Think, its contribution to marketing strategy, and its po-

tential impact on marketing research practice. From all three perspectives, this is a very important book.

How Customers Think argued that understanding the consumer's unconscious mind is absolutely critical and that the unconscious is not effectively accessed through conventional market research quantitative questioning approaches. It helped us to understand that consumers' emotional response occurs before rational thought and in fact, decision making always has emotional

components. Marketing Metaphoria builds on th

central premise and discusses a key dimension of

the unconscious mind, namely how it frames un-

conscious thought. As such Marketing Metaphor

continues to develop the central premise of the

current feel-do-think model that is emerging in

marketing.The basic premise in Marketing Metaphoria is

that most thought and feelings are unconscious

and are essentially governed by metaphors. Ger-

ald and Lindsay Zaitman refer to different levels

of metaphors, but focus on what they call "deep

metaphors," which operate unconsciously, auto-

matically, are universal, and are encoded in us

starting at a very young age. After thousands of

"Z-MET" interviews (their proprietary method that

leverages metaphors), they have found seven met-

aphors that account for over 70% of all the meta-

phors they uncover. I'll just list a few here to give

the reader a flavor:

• Balance (imbalance). This describes a state of

well-being (or disquiet) due to physical, emo-

tional, moral, and social factors. Balance is en-

coded in us at an early age; for example, as we

learn to walk, we want a sense of physical

balance.

• Transformation. An actual or contemplated

change