Consumers, Brands and the Unconscious
I’ve just been reading a review of a book called Marketing Metaphoria by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman.
Their website explains that ‘In some twelve thousand in-depth interviews for more than a hundred clients in over thirty countries, seven deep metaphors have surfaced with the greatest frequency in every [business] sector- finance, food, transportation, and so forth- and in every country, regardless of the research team.
People who otherwise differ in cultural background, age, gender, education, occupation, political values, consumer experiences, basic beliefs, religious preference, and almost anything else we can name share these seven giants:
- Balance
- Transformation
- Journey
- Container
- Connection
- Resource
- Control’
So the book’s on order because for me, I can’t wait to discover how these deep metaphors – so effectively filters, values or beliefs – can be shared across humankind if not from a deeper history or structuring.
What got me really excited in the Financial Times review was that ‘the Zaltman’s explain that “deep metaphors” are “unconscious viewing lenses” that help us to structure what we think, hear, say and do’
So in NLP terms, it sounds like the existence of pre-loaded or early-formed metaprogrammes? So if businesses or advertisers play to, and align with these ‘giants’ in their advertising they have the ability to place their products within a pre-built structure.
Just Seven Things 