Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Getting branding back on track

Clint Witchalls

Tuesday, 3rd June 2008

Clint Witchalls wades through the marketing mojo bombarding consumers

Gerald Zaltman, an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School, believes that most marketers suffer from a ‘depth deficit’. They run focus groups and marketing surveys, but they only scratch the surface of consumers’ thoughts. This results in weak product development and ineffective product launches. If you really want to understand consumers, he says, you need to get inside their heads. Literally.

For years, Zaltman has been probing the minds of consumers, using a mixture of psychology, linguistics and art therapy. What he discovered is that people, regardless of culture or geographical location, relate to products through just seven ‘deep metaphors’: balance, transformation, journey, container, connection, resource and control. These are the ‘viewing lenses’ that consumers use at a subconscious level when deciding which travel agent to use or which brand of soap powder to buy.

In Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald Zaltman and his son, Lindsay Zaltman, introduce us to each of these seven archetypes. How do you arrive at a deep metaphor? Well, first you have surface metaphors such as ‘money runs through his fingers’ and ‘I am drowning in debt’. Then, at a more base level, a metaphor theme begins to emerge: ‘money is a liquid’. Scratch even further and you arrive at the deep metaphor: resource.

Some products are associated with more than one deep metaphor, so medication might rebalance your system, it will also transform you and it could take you on a journey from being sick to being well. And, if the medicine doesn’t work, you may end up in a wooden container. OK, maybe container should be left out of the product segmentation, but you get the idea. Find out which deep metaphor your product ‘resonates’ – to use the Zaltmans’ favourite word – and then make sure you provide a consistent message to your customers.

In Marketing Metaphoria, we learn that when a deep metaphor is repeated often enough it creates an entire ‘neural network’ in our brain. Or, to put it in layman’s terms: if something is repeated often enough, you’ll remember it. The Zaltmans give us the example of Budweiser, which has been associated with the deep metaphor ‘connection’ for so long (remember the ‘Whazzup?’ campaign?), that it effectively ‘owns’ the deep metaphor. ‘As an added benefit, a brand that plants a metaphor deep enough to reorganise consumers’ neural structures will prevent other brands from establishing this same association among consumers,’ the Zaltmans tell us.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page