Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don’t understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don’t think deeply about consumers’ innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a groundbreaking book that reveals how to overcome this “depth deficit” and find the universal drivers of human behavior so vital to a firm’s success.
Marketing Metaphoria reveals the powerful unconscious viewing lenses–called “deep metaphors”– that shape what people think, hear, say, and do.
Drawing on thousands of one-on-one interviews in more than thirty countries, Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman describe how some of the world’s most successful companies as well as small firms, not-for-profits, and social enterprises have successfully leveraged deep metaphors to solve a wide variety of marketing problems. Marketing Metaphoria should convince you that everything consumers think and do is influenced at unconscious levels–and it will give you access to those deeper levels of thinking.
“An imaginative and insightful application of cognitive science to the world of business, rich with implications for both fields.”
-Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and author, How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought.
“Marketing Metaphoria is one of the most fascinating business books I have read in a long time. A brilliant combination of deep insight and actionable advice, it will forever change how you think about marketing.”
-Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind
“Despite the availability of increasingly sophisticated methods, most customer relationships remain standardized, superficial, and lacking in informed customization. Through deep metaphors, the Zaltmans provide an insightful and provocative framework for identifying and learning from the implicit cognitive influences on customer decision making that can enhance and deepen intimacy and loyalty.”
-Gary W. Loveman, Chairman, CEO and President, Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc.
“Any business seeking to build global brands should read the Zaltmans’ groundbreaking work on metaphors. The universal power of deep metaphors crosses borders and generations, and enduring brands trade off this thinking, whether their owners know it or not.”
-Tom Long, President and CEO, Miller Brewing Company
“A disruptive book that will change how you think about customer insights. The emotional power offered within these pages will energize you to dig deeper into your business and turn thin functional insights into rich emotional messages that will propel your business.”
-Donna J. Sturgess, Global Head of Innovation, GlaxoSmithKline
“With the profound advances in psychology and neuroscience over the past two decades, I’m convinced that now is the time for practitioners to rewrite the ‘principles of marketing.’ Marketing Metaphoria transforms insights from the authors’ research into a rich framework that will help you think more deeply about your consumers and develop more innovative ideas for action. Read it twice, then keep it on your desk for ready reference.”
-Bob Woodard, Vice President, Global Consumer and Customer Insights, Campbell Soup Company
Customer Review: A Resource to Transform Your Thinking
By way of full disclosure, I was a graduate assistant for Jerry Zaltman when he was a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Naturally, I’ve followed Jerry’s many publications for these past 20 years and have never found the time I’ve invested in reading his latest ideas less than incredibly worthwhile.
Interestingly, I bought this book based solely on the title and my expectation that it would be full of new ideas and insights about how using metaphors in marketing tactics would influence consumer behavior. While this book does cover material related to that sort of thing, it really covers so much more. The first two chapters on thinking deeply, “Workable Wondering” and focusing on consumer similarities set the stage for how to take the insights and ideas from the next 7 chapters (one per each deep metaphor) and incorporate them into your own thinking. The last chapter ties things together and presents a number of ideas for how Deep Metaphors may influence a number of marketing strategies and tactics.
This book is written to stimulate your thinking about how Deep Metaphors apply in many areas of marketing and consumer behavior. It doesn’t present a list of “to dos” or lay out a plan of action that you should follow. Instead, you’ll find yourself seeing what you, your consumers and your competitors do in a new light.
Customer Review: Getting managers thinking
Another great book from Zaltman, with more excellent insights into the way people think.
I found it a more straightforward read than the excellent ‘How Customers Think’. And it has an even blunter message for managers: “Start paying proper attention to how your customers really make their buying decisions, or miss out!”
As a metaphor elicitation specialist I was wowed by some of the fine detail, such as the description of the relationship between deep metaphor and emotion. But if most readers focus on the high-level message – the crucial importance of deep metaphor in guiding human behaviour – I’ll be absolutely delighted!
If, like reviewer Dave Lakhani, you’re disappointed by the book’s lack of a detailed methodology for eliciting metaphors, why not check out a non-proprietary technique such as Clean Language? Though I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I… 
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