Thanks to my last posting I’m now in touch with Anne Miller, author of ‘Metaphorically Selling’. Her book focusses on the power of metaphor ‘to pierce through information clutter to get others to see the unique value of their services, explanations, and propositions’… ‘you will be heard, be understood, be remembered, and get the results you want.’

‘Of course metaphors are the obvious way to sell anything,’ I thought. ‘Does it really need a whole book to say that?’

But the truth is, it’s not obvious to everyone that all those powerful politicians etc are using metaphor to communicate directly with the audience’s unconscious minds. It’s not obvious that metaphor matters that much - until you start to explore the subject. It’s only then that you start to notice metaphors everywhere, scattered liberally through every sentence.

In fact, particularly if you learn Clean Language, you start to notice everyone using metaphor, all the time. Metaphor is not just the preserve of the powerful, the famous, and the influential - it’s part of how each of us constructs our inner worlds. One or two carefully-placed Clean Language questions will bring out the detail in a casually-used metaphor, fill in the colour, bring it to life.

What the ‘metaphorical sellers’ are doing is using metaphor consciously and more-or-less overtly to influence people. And it works!

This entry was posted on Sunday 14 September 2008 and is filed under Blog.

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