Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers

Citation

Gountas, J. (2008), "Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 25 No. 7, pp. 482-483. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760810915707

Marketing Metaphoria is very interesting and easy to read because it explains what consumer metaphors are in a layman's language. The book is very well‐constructed because it takes the reader systematically through the theory and practice and shows how deep‐seated emotional and cognitive metaphors can be brought to the surface. Metaphors are used to verbalise unconscious needs of which consumers are not fully aware, and therefore marketers do not realise either what these core decision‐drivers are. The authors use an innovative research approach, which combines depth interviews and actual experimental work to uncover and construct the deep‐seated consumer metaphors about the real meaning of their thoughts, feelings, and desirable tangible outcomes.

The book makes a very valid and important point right at the outset regarding how important deep thinking is for marketers, and therefore clear understanding of what consumers really want from a product or service is of paramount importance. Few managers seem to go beyond the surface understanding of consumer needs, and this book makes it clear again and again through the plethora of industry examples how short‐sighted many consumer researchers and managers are. The book is most useful for brand managers, communications managers and consumer researchers of all kinds of product categories. The underpinning theoretical framework is a combination of sociological and psychological paradigms that help marketers to understand better consumers' individual needs as well as their social values and attitudes. The book provides a thorough explanation of the seven deep metaphors and how they have been applied successfully in a range of product/brand positioning and marketing communications activities.

The book is organised in ten chapters, which are logically sequenced. The first chapter is a general explanation of what deep metaphors are and how they have been developed. The second chapter points out the multiple benefits of critical thinking and in‐depth understanding of customers needs. It tries to persuade the reader of the wide range of applications for all kinds of marketing activities in every type of industry and product categories. Chapters Three to Nine deal with each of the seven deep metaphors, and Chapter Ten provides an overview of how these metaphors can by used strategically in all kinds of product categories throughout the world. The seven metaphors have developed over a long period through extensive research of approximately twelve‐thousand depth interviews in over thirty countries around the world.

The main essence of the book is the seven‐metaphor model that is explained in detail in chapters Three to Nine. The third chapter deals with the first metaphor of “balance”, interpreted as the need for justice, equilibrium, organising properly the order of conflicting and competing needs in the consumer's life. Chapter Four concerns the metaphor of “transformation” and evolution of consumer lifestyles, needs and self‐identities. This chapter introduces the idea that emotions and affect are very important forces in the way consumers see themselves and their social world, and it explores how they construct their provisional worldview. Marketers need to pay attention to this ever‐changing self‐identity landscape, and their marketing activities should reflect this as accurately as possible. Chapter Four also talks about the inevitable (physical and psychological) “journeys” metaphor that consumers go through because they engage actively in constructing and reconstructing their past, present, and future life and self‐identity. It seems a bit difficult to see how the metaphors about journeys, transformation and balance differ fundamentally from each other. There is a common thread that runs between all these metaphors, but the authors' interpretation is not convincing enough to make them stand out as clearly as they could.

Chapter Six discusses the idea of “containers” and how this metaphor can express the deep‐seated needs for being part or cutting off loose from social networks that link up past, present, and future life choices. The metaphor of containers could be expressed as the universal need for social inclusion and that all humans are fundamentally social animals with individual preferences about a variety of different social interactions.

The seventh chapter builds up a more detailed story on how individual consumers value their personal and interpersonal “connections”. Brand choices are expressions of what a person thinks and feels about him‐ or her‐self and what that individual wants to project to the outside world.

Chapter Eight discusses the metaphor of “resources” or material possessions. Material resources and acquisitions are influential in expressing whom the individual is and what social impressions they want to create. This is not a new deep metaphor but a personality trait and a social value that has been around for millennia. Materialism has a sound philosophical basis, and there is extensive research about individual consumer behaviour and influence on decision choices. There is an underlining logical connection between the metaphors in Chapters Six (container), Seven (connection) and Eight (resources), but again the authors' interpretation of the individual consumer needs could have been constructed in a number of different ways, depending on the researchers subjective and individual point of view.

The overall framework of the seven metaphors is very useful and adds to the understanding of consumers' preferences. However, the interpretation of consumer needs for different product categories is somewhat simplified because the authors' interpretations are rather general and in many cases lack in‐depth understanding of specific needs. For example in the case of travel metaphors (p.82), the overall findings and suggestions for marketing managers seem to be surface motives which are pretty obvious to any tourism marketing professional. There is an awful lot of in‐depth research (qualitative and quantitative) available on tourism motives and kind of deep metaphors or deep‐seated values that consumer researchers have uncovered in the tourism industry and therefore the authors need to focus more on the product categories that they are provisionally experts in.

The seven deep metaphors are constructed through a series of carefully thought out questions using proprietorial research tool called the ZMET. However, similar research processes exist, such as decision trees, thematic apperception techniques, or the laddering process that can unlock deeper thoughts and feelings to uncover what are the core and the surface motives or needs of the consumers. The problem that every researcher faces is that consumers' needs and self‐images are a moving target, and therefore they develop and change to certain degree constantly throughout their life cycles. It is therefore possible to develop a large number of “deep understandings” or “deep insights” of who they are, what matters to them, how they see their social world and how their consumption decisions link up within a moving range of individual and social relationships. The seven metaphors model is inherently an idiographic type of research method and therefore it is difficult to generalise beyond the individual product category and narrow market segments. The authors provide a range of examples to bolster their claim that this method is generalisable and valid for cross‐ cultural applications, but there is very little empirical evidence that tests these claims.

The book quotes Einstein's idea (p. xxi) that “human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust and we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper”. The authors suggest that we have no evidence that vegetables and cosmic dust dance to any tune, let alone a mysterious one, but we know that human beings do. According to the authors, the invisible piper is the unconscious mind, where most thought originates, and those mysterious tunes that emanate are expressed as deep metaphors. Each metaphor is complex and far‐reaching, but not that mysterious, once you read this book and therefore learn how to listen to them carefully.

There is no evidence in the book about the power of the unconscious mind and how human beings dance to its tune, which is a problem. If we accept that individual consumers have different personalities and different needs which are shaped by a variety of social and cultural influences, then it is almost quite impossible to arrive at these seven metaphors which are interconnected but at the same time distinctive emotional and cognitive entities. The idea that the unconscious mind is the main reason for these deep metaphors is a questionable philosophical claim, which has not been yet substantiated empirically. The suggestion that there are invisible unconscious metaphors borders into mysticism and therefore is not a sound basis for marketing decisions.

There is a value in using the construct of metaphors, but it would be more helpful if it were expanded further by breaking them down into more detailed and distinctive constructs like attitudes, motives, values, which guide our consumer decisions. The seven metaphors theory does not make allowance for the situational factors that may influence temporally consumer decisions, and yet the authors claim to have found a way to listen and learn how to unlock these universal complex metaphors that account for all types of well thought out, emotional and impulsive decisions. The authors need to provide more empirical evidence to substantiate their claims in order to persuade marketers who do think critically in their decision‐making process.

Overall, I have found the book very interesting, easy to read and a useful introduction to making sense of how metaphors and generic consumer preferences can be used in a variety of marketing applications.