Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers by Gerald Zaltman & Lindsay H. Zaltman

Author:Gerald Zaltman & Lindsay H. Zaltman [Zaltman, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2008-05-05T14:00:00+00:00

The Mind As Container

Although the most obvious examples of the container metaphor evoke physical objects, the mind is the most common container. Knowledge, memories, and emotions—our entire sense of self— are the precious elements contained within the mind. The mind represents a unique container that each person considers his or her own, inviolable space.

Memories

We often regard our memories as our most personal possessions. They contain who we are, our defining personal and cultural stories.8 Not coincidentally, the words storage, store, and story have a common derivative involving container. Moreover, memories are malleable and dynamic, not fixed containers.9 Although digitized photographs, video, and audio can preserve records of our unique personal moments—“Is it live or is it Memorex?”—and Web logs can capture our innermost thoughts and feelings, computer hardware increasingly stores our more factual, transactional memory in documents, software code, Internet pages, and databases, whether we want it to or not. When hackers steal—or when companies exploit or mishandle—that memory, especially without our knowledge or permission, we feel violated or invaded.

The memory container performs many functions for consumers. For example, a major hotel and resort chain wanted to understand what “get away” meant to consumers. It discovered that memories have restorative qualities; they help consumers replenish themselves. One consumer explained, “When I go on holiday, I sit at the beach or on the balcony and say, ‘How beautiful this moment is.’ My mind can store that feeling for a very long time. When I am at work, the image of that beautiful day pops up and makes me feel much better.” Subsequently, the chain developed a special set of communications that it delivers periodically to remind previous clients of peaceful settings and their experiences at the hotel or resort or nearby locations. The captions of the images in these communications stress the special feelings that these places evoke, once someone has experienced them.

In a study of the tagline “feel good,” we found that memory holds feelings of pride and experiences to share with others: “Having memories is important. I revel in the past. I do not want to forget what makes me happy or proud. I want to keep and share those positive feelings.” Notice how this consumer refers to memories as something to have, keep, and share, as if she can possess memory as a container. Indeed, memories enable us to hold on to time and even slow it down. The metaphor “hold on tightly” occurs in this customer’s comment on the use of imaging software for computers: “I always feel that time is passing too quickly and running away from me. There are certain situations where you are happy, lucky, lusting for life, and you want to capture and hold on tightly to them. Whenever you feel bad, you can look at these pictures again.”

In a project for Hallmark Cards, Inc. on the meaning of memories in people’s lives, we found that consumers thought of their memories as containers: “A person’s life is like an hourglass. The grains of sand inside are the memories that constitute that life and everything that happened to it.

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