RESEARCH & IDEAS
Connecting with Consumers
Using Deep Metaphors
Published: May 5, 2008
Author: Martha Lagace
Consumer needs and desires are not
entirely mysterious. In fact, marketers of
successful brands regularly draw on a rich
assortment of insights excavated from research
into basic frames or orientations we have
toward the world around us, according to HBS
professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman and
Lindsay Zaltman, authors of Marketing
Metaphoria. Here's a Q&A and book excerpt.
Key concepts include:
• Deep metaphors are powerful predictors of
what customers think and how they react to
new or existing goods and services.
• The seven deep metaphors discussed in
Marketing Metaphoria appear across a
variety of products.
• Recent advances in various disciplines are
providing concepts and techniques enabling
marketers to dig into what consumers don't
know they know.
Think of famous brands you know:
Hallmark cards and Coca-Cola soft drinks, for
example. What do these products have in
common for consumers?
An emotional meaning that taps into
thoughts and feelings related to the positive
aspects of transformation, according to Gerald
Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of
Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors
Reveal about the Minds of Consumers (HBS
Press, 2008). Transformation is just one
metaphor that finds expression in products that
satisfy deeply held consumer needs and desires.
Other metaphors they notice include balance,
journey, and connection.
Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor at
Harvard Business School, and Lindsay Zaltman,
managing director of Olson Zaltman
Associates, a research and consulting firm,
believe that deep insights from consumers are
essential for brands that resonate. In this e-mail
Q&A, they describe the thinking behind
Marketing Metaphoria and how insights about
deep metaphors can improve brand success.
Martha Lagace: What are deep
metaphors?
Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman:
Deep metaphors are basic frames or orientations
COPYRIGHT 2007 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
we have toward the world around us. They are
"deep" because they are largely unconscious
and universal. They are "metaphors" because
they recast everything we think about, hear, say,
and do. Because deep metaphors shape the way
we engage the world, an understanding of them
is necessary to explain why we think and act as
we do.
While relatively few in number, much like
core emotions, each deep metaphor may take
many different forms. For example, balance
may involve social, psychological, physical,
and aesthetic themes. The small number of deep
metaphors, each with many variations, and
often working together, constitute a silent but
rich and powerful language of thought and
expression.
It is a language that marketers must learn to
speak if they are to understand and connect
meaningfully with their customers.
Q: How did you become fascinated by
deep metaphors?
A: We noticed in study after study all
around the world that deep metaphors were the
most powerful predictors of what customers
think and how they react to new or existing
goods and services. It was as if we had
identified a secret code of thought, one that
customers were unaware they were using. For
any given topic, two or three basic deep
metaphors would be highly relevant no matter
how varied the set of customers or consumers
being studied were in other ways.
It was as if we had
identified a secret code of
thought.
The seven deep metaphors discussed in
Marketing Metaphoria are those appearing most
often across a variety of products ranging from
the choice of motor oil for trucks to baby
aspirin to home computers to the meaning of
quality health care.
Q: Why are these metaphors important
for effective marketing? What happens when
marketing does not give attention to them in
branding and other efforts?
A: Most thinking occurs without awareness.
Even conscious thought originates in
unconscious processes. Growing recognition of
this is one reason for the increased interest
among marketers of the role of emotions in
decision-making.
Deep metaphors, being a part of this
unconscious language of thought, have three
special implications for marketers. First, they
are the best, and some linguists argue the only
way, to learn about the content of emotions.
Knowing the actual content of an emotion is
critical. The right type of emotion might be
activated but involve the wrong content.
For example, when an advertisement, brand
name, scent, or some other stimulus produces a
negative reaction, deep metaphors enable us to
discover whether shame, guilt, or some other
negative feeling is producing the aversive or
negative experience.
Second, deep metaphors provide the basic
foundations for the brand stories people create
based on marketing communications. If
managers are to influence the stories consumers
create or their relationship with a brand or
company, they need to know what deep
metaphors are operating. These metaphor
insights then allow managers to leverage them
in advertising, packaging, product design, and
so on. For this reason, they are fundamental
building blocks for developing customer
relationships.
Third, because deep metaphors are shared
by consumers who may vary considerably on
the surface, they become very powerful tools
for developing new product concepts,
communicating about them, restructuring
market segmentation strategies, and simplifying
product design processes. They are the way of
answering the important question, "What is the
common denominator around or about which
consumers vary?" We can't say that two groups,
for instance, are different without reference to a
common yardstick. That common yardstick—or
deep metaphor—is far more important to
understand than the various positions taken on
it, although those too are important.
Q: What to your mind are a few effective
marketing campaigns that have utilized
knowledge of deep metaphors? What did
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they do that was unusual or insightful?
A: Two classic campaigns come to mind.
One is Coca-Cola's "I'd like to teach the world
to sing," which invokes the deep metaphor of
connection and the ability of the brand to bring
diverse people together. It also engaged the
deep metaphor of social balance by stressing
with a music metaphor the concept of harmony.
A second campaign is the Michelin tire ad
portraying the tire as a container—another deep
metaphor—of safety for one's family, especially
children. The last version of the ad, which ran
for many years, showed a child positioned
within a tire on a wet surface accompanied by
several pairs of animals. This invoked imagery
of Noah's Ark, one of the most famous
containers of all time that withstood a major
catastrophe.
Q: How do you see the future of
marketing? Is marketing becoming more or
less responsive to consumer needs and
desires?
A: Marketers in general have always tried to
be responsive to consumer needs and
preferences. The issue is whether they do so as
well as they could by using the most
appropriate or insight-bearing tools and
techniques. The high failure rate of new
offerings and the failure of existing offerings to
achieve expected returns suggests that many
marketers are not thinking deeply enough about
their customers or consumers. And they fail to
think deeply enough partly because they lack
deep insights to think about.
Fortunately, recent advances in various
disciplines are providing concepts and
techniques enabling marketers to dig into what
consumers don't know they know. As these
advances in understanding human behavior are
used by marketers, they will be able to serve
their markets with greater success.
Q: What are you working on next?
Gerald Zaltman: I have had a
long-standing interest in how managers
approach messy or ill-structured problems.
These are nonroutine problems with no clear
solution. It may not even be evident what the
problem is, only that there is one. I have
collected considerable data on this topic and
will be conducting further interviews to
understand the qualities of mind that contribute
to success in dealing with this important class
of problems.
Lindsay Zaltman: I have been exploring
new ways to leverage the power of deep
metaphors in other research methods. For
instance, I have been developing an applied
ethnographic approach that allows us to see
how deep metaphors influence the behaviors
and actions of consumers by spending time with
them in their actual environment. This may
mean spending time with consumers by
observing them in their homes, on shopping
excursions, at social functions, or at their jobs.
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HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | WORKING KNOWLEDGE | HBSWK.HBS.EDU
Insights from this approach can be used for
improving product design, reengineering retail
environments, or simply as a way to better
understand one's customers.
Excerpt from Marketing Metaphoria: What
Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of
Consumers
By Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman
Loyalty Is a Two-Way Street
Brand loyalty is perhaps the most discussed
topic in marketing, and rightly so. The lifetime
value of a customer can be very high and
warrants the special costs of securing enduring
commitments to your brand. Consider this
consumer: "I am driving in the car, I am out of
coffee, I see a Stop & Shop, and I say, 'Oh, I've
got to get my coffee.' I go down the coffee aisle,
and it is out of Taster's Choice. I must find
another store that sells it. So I get back in the
car, go to Star Market, go down the coffee aisle,
and there it is, my Taster's Choice, and I say,
'See, I'm loyal to you. I purchased you. I will
only buy you."
Consumers develop brand loyalty because
the product consistently delivers what it
promises, and it resonates emotionally.
However, just because the term loyalty implies
a special connection does not mean a brand
must activate connection as a deep metaphor to
achieve consumer loyalty. Instead, the brand
must effectively leverage any relevant deep
metaphor to motivate product trial and the
repeat purchase behavior that culminates in
loyalty.
The Harvard Business School's Mind of the
Market Lab conducted several projects for a
consortium of firms owning some of the world's
leading brands. The findings across projects
emphasized loyalty as a reciprocal process. One
business customer in the computer industry
said, "I am giving loyalty, and I am getting
loyalty back. That is what loyalty is about, a
two-way street. It feels safer for me when it is
equal, when it goes both ways."
In our interviews with brand managers, we
often notice that while they think of consumer
loyalty to a brand, they do not think of a brand
as loyalty to its consumers. Consumers become
aware of this one-sidedness. When asked, many
loyal consumers did not feel that the company
or the brand reciprocated their own
commitment. While consumers may continue to
use those brands and thus, by some standards,
be deemed loyal, the loyalty is fragile. Consider
these expressions:
• "I would not bank anywhere else. I opened
my very first account here when I was
younger, but frankly I do not think the bank
really worries about my banking elsewhere.
I am one of thousands. Why would it care
about me in particular? My impression is
that it does not."
• "They tell me in that chirpy, recorded voice
that my call is very important to them and
then they put me on hold forever, and I keep
thinking, 'Like yeah, right, I am really
important.' "
• "I keep going back to them because they
provide a really high-quality
product—because they worry about their
competition, not because they care about
me."
• "All these points programs. Or the coupons.
I use them. But basically they are buying
me; they are not being loyal to me. It kind
of says, 'We must do these extra things
because we are not doing enough with what
we give you to begin with."
Many other consumer quotes suggest an
asymmetry in loyalty. That is, the consumers
feel more strongly connected to the brands than
the brands are to them—not a healthy or secure
foundation for building brand loyalty.
Companies cannot simply offer quality
products, because competitors can always
emulate a quality product. Companies must
convey that they have the consumer's best
interest at heart. This is one reason consumers
use their perceptions of how firms treat their
employees as a proxy for how firms value their
customers. As one consumer put it, "If they
don't treat their staff well, you can hardly expect
them to care about us."
Summary
We human beings have a fundamental drive
or need for connection and, at times, for being
disconnected. This has roots in our evolutionary
history, because individuals and groups with the
ability to bond and support one another were
more likely to survive. Thus, the need for
affiliation became an enduring driver of
behavior. This need has extended to individual
identity; in fact, it is said that the mind is not
the possession of the individual and that our
notions of self are determined significantly by
the various individuals and groups with whom
we connect. Sometimes, connection is
expressed through the consumption of material
things that reflect social membership, help us
feel accepted, or demonstrate our relative
position in society. Consumers develop strong
attachments to objects, brands, and companies.
Marketing managers must be sensitive to
several connection-related issues:
• Connection is a two-way street, and
consumers are most apt to feel loyalty to
brands and companies if they feel those in
charge have a commitment to them.
• Products and services can provide
connection or disengagement, or both. The
offerings may be a badge showing informal
membership in a group or society
(connection), may offer a means of being
apart from others (status via
disengagement), or may afford the
consumer private time (disengagement).
• Other goods and services provide a sense of
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inner connection and sense of connection
with others.
Managers must identify the dimensions of
connection that are most relevant or could be
made more relevant to consumers. For example,
managers need to consider whether a product
offers connection with, or disconnection from,
others or oneself. And they must decide
COPYRIGHT 2007 PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE
HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL | WORKING KNOWLEDGE | HBSWK.HBS.EDU
whether a connection is physical, social, or about the Minds of Consumers. Copyright 2008
mental. Once these levels of connection are Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay H. Zaltman.
understood, marketing managers can better
show how a product or service attends to the
consumer's basic human needs.
About the author
Book excerpt used with the permission of Martha Lagace is the senior editor of HBS
Harvard Business School Press from Marketing Working Knowledge.
Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal
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