Podcast interview with Lindsay Zaltman, author of Marketing Metaphoria

Whether people are selling toasters or a national healthcare policy, the tried and true marketing method tends to be a laundry list of features and benefits, a logical, left-brained approach to persuasion. Linguistics guru George Lakoff showed how disastrous this approach has been for Democrats over the past 30 years in Don’t Think of an Elephant, the first popular look at the importance of metaphor in persuasive communication. The book details how Republicans have sidestepped the policy details and succeeded by instead focusing on the subconscious metaphorical “frames” that people hold in their minds on issues.

In Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman show how appealing to people’s metaphorical understanding of the world applies equally to selling everything from cell phones to hearing aids. The father and son team (Gerald, a former HBS professsor and author of How Customers Think) explain the their method for working with marketing teams to find the metaphors that will best speak to their customer’s understanding of a product.

Most people learned the word “metaphor” in lit class and think of it, sometimes hazily, as a sophisticated literary device for writers. In fact, most people use five to six metaphors a minute in conversation, according to Zaltman, managing director of Olson Zaltman Associates, a marketing consultancy. Using a metaphor is simply thinking of one experience in terms of another. If you say, “I destroyed his argument,” you are using war as a metaphor for verbal argument.

Metaphors are how humans categorize, or frame our experiences and there are 16 metaphors that are universal across all cultures, according to Zaltman. The seven most common metaphors are Balance, Container, Connection, Control, Resource, Journey, Transformation.

One example is the metaphor of Balance, such as “I feel out of kilter,” or “I feel more centered after my vacation.” Zaltman says the Balance family of metaphors are likely derived from our shared experience of growing up and learning to do things like walk or drink from a cup without spilling. We later take this idea and apply it to things like our mental or emotional state.

For marketers, metaphors are a way to literally learn how customers think about a product and to build communication to accommodate their frame of mind. For instance, Zaltman found that people view diamonds through a Journey metaphor framework because they look at diamonds as kind of mile markers in life. A hearing aid company found that their customers found experienced their product through a Container frame, in terms of the product enabling them to escape the limits their hearing imposed on them.

This also works with B-to-B products. For instance, Cisco felt it was missing emotion in its brand. After working with Zaltman, they found they found was that there was an huge emotional response to the metaphor of Connection in their audience and that led to the company’s successful “Human Network” campaign, which is now three years old.