Publications

Publication details [#12878]

Covington, Vickie. 2012. Marketing Metaphoria: Undressing the Mind of the Consumer. The Qualitative Report 17 (18) : 1–5. 5 pp. URL
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English

Abstract

This paper constitutes a review of “Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers”, by Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, which is an interesting account of what people think and how they verbalize their thoughts by means of metaphors. The study refers to a marketing research tool called ZMET, which is a technique that elicits conscious and unconscious thoughts of the consumers expressed in a non-literal manner. The writers claim that there are seven deep metaphors: balance, journey, transformation/change, container, connection, resource and control. This classification was based on corpora gathered by twelve thousand interviews in over thirty countries. The writers also explain that the different types of metaphors result by the unique individual experiences, the social context, and the impact of firms’ marketing activities on consumers, as well as media. The book was written for the marketing industry, but at the same time it provides information of how consumers engage specific emotions and how they express this by using metaphoric cues.