Marketing Metaphoria: Undressing the Mind of the Consumer

Abstract

The book by Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman (2008), Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers, builds on the premise that most thoughts are unconscious and what people think are actually in frames of pictures, not necessarily words. The authors focus on seven deep metaphors in which they believe is the key to understanding consumer’s minds and thus that marketing firms and managers can truly understand what consumer’s desire and need. These seven deep metaphors are explained in detail and are the meat of this book. Mr. Zaltman has conducted several thousand qualitative inquiries using his patented marketing research tool called ZMET, Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique. This book does not go in depth into the procedures and process of ZMET, which is a downfall to its overall usefulness to the qualitative research industry.