Last night I finished reading Marketing Metaphoria, another great book from Gerald Zaltman, featuring more excellent insights into the way people think in metaphor. I found it a more straightforward read than the excellent ‘How Customers Think’.

And it has an even blunter message for managers: “Start paying proper attention to how your customers really make their buying decisions, or miss out!”

As a metaphor elicitation specialist I was wowed by some of the fine detail, such as the description of the relationship between deep metaphor and emotion. But if most readers focus on the high-level message - the crucial importance of deep metaphor in guiding human behaviour - I’ll be absolutely delighted!

If you’re interested in finding out how to uncover your customers’ deep, metphors - most of which they won’t be conscious of - you may well be interested in Clean Language. Though I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I…

This entry was posted on Saturday 9 August 2008 and is filed under Blog.

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