Metaphor marketing and the arts

December 29, 2011 0 comments

The metaphor marketing and arts is virtually universal. Even since I was a teenager, in my home country, the best way to sell products and services was not only to know all technical details about your offerings, but understand the mood and behaviors of your clientele. The only way to know your customers is to ask questions and carefully listen.

I read an interesting story about the birth of ZMET ( Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique). ZMET has become licensed and technically you can use the idea to create your own methods for deed interviews.

The researcher decided that if he makes pictures of the different places he visits, it will be his prospective. So he decided to give his camera to the locals, who never seen or used cameras before, saying to them 'If you were to leave this village, what pictures would you take with you to show others what your life is like?'

It was exciting to discover how effective people were in telling stories. In every strip of negatives, there was a story - one full of paradox, contrast, and contradiction.

Most of the photos cut off people's feet, but was because being barefoot was a sign of poverty and people wanted to hide poverty issues.

Then when he returned to states, he decided to try to do the same asking people making pictures or products and services, and analyze results...

I believe that every researcher is able to create his or her own deep interview technique. You need to open up your heart and intuition and ask people do the same.

When you can get to people's unconscious, you can go beyond mind's grasp, and you can reveal what people mean and what they need. If English is not the first language of your consumers, you can use visual techniques to understand them. So no more linguistic gap.

Your success depends on your ability to leverage the power of figurative language to find the deeper “whys” that underlie consumers’ interpretations, stories, choices and behaviors.

People use 5-6 metaphors per minute of ordinary conversation. Metaphors can reveal the thoughts and feelings that occur below awareness in the unconscious mind.

I write poetry in Russian and I believe that art is the highest way of communication, sometimes even higher then engineering and science. Poets understand what metaphor is - viewing one thing in terms of another - is central to thought and crucial to uncovering latent needs and emotion; surprisingly marketers are so caught up in the literal, they neglect the metaphoric.

Marketing should be artistic, metaphoric, deep and fun.

Posted by Lisa
Categories: Marketing