By Charles Peirce
Deep Metaphors are a concept from Harvard Professor, marketer, and researcher Gerald Zaltman that find their obvious use in marketing but have many possible applications for communication of all kinds. They are similar to Archetypes and Archetype Theory in that they represent a base symbolic language which communicates via the subconscious. But whereas Archetype Theory is based upon Jungian psychoanalysis, Deep Metaphors come primarily from the study of cognitive science, neuro-imaging, and linguistics. While not a substitute for Archetype Theory (nor a replacement), they are a useful tool in dealing with many issues of marketing, not least among them market segmentation and niche audiences.
Having worked for years with Harvard’s Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Zaltman’s work with Deep Metaphors represents the attempt to create a concrete applied system to leverage insights from findings in neuroscience into marketing. In his book How Customers Think [1], Zaltman explains much of this, discussing the idea of how memories are formed, how we create meaning and relationships between disparate stimulus, and how we communicate largely on a secondary subconscious level. Pre-existing biases and emotional responses [2] play a far larger role in our decisions and choices than we’re aware of, and the further that something is from our normative, conventional frame of reference, the more these subconscious forces come into play. In effect, this is the deeper, second level which we communicate on. Learning to hear and see and speak on its terms allows for more affective communication.
Given all that, Deep Metaphors are Zaltman’s effort to address this level of communication directly. In the idea of Deep Metaphors, Zaltman focuses on how language choices (literally the metaphors we use to describe things) reveal deeper concerns and ideas in the structuring of individual thoughts. In this sense, Metaphors are beyond (or before) language, existing and operating abstractly, populating the subconscious, and manifesting, eventually, in language and concrete ideas. In essence, the often unintentional poetics of our language reveal a deeper psychology and structure at play.
Through extensive study and quantification of these patterns, Zaltman identifies commonalities, eventually seizing on a small set of primal “Big Seven” Deep Metaphors — the core ideas with which we organize our thinking about self, others, society, and reality itself — which are seen again and again, across cultures, independent language, age, profession, class, or gender. [3]
The Deep Metaphors
Balance: Ideas of equilibrium, harmony, justice and the interplay of forces, whether they be physical, emotional, social, or moral. Fluid states rather than fixed ones. Skillful juggling of life’s obstacles on one side, the purposeful search for imbalance on the other (“doing something crazy to stay sane”).
Transformation: Ideas of changing from one form to another, actual or contemplated, desired or not. Also the absence of transformation, stasis or paralysis.
Journey: The awareness of time, progress, and age, and our own movement through all of these.
Container: Focusing around the idea of keeping things in or keeping things out. An often topological conception of self or mental states. This includes everything from the idea of being in somebody’s heart, to a house, to hugging, to prisons.
Connection: The need for affiliation, belonging, and being a part of something — or the disconnect from the same.
Resource: Things used to achieve or accomplish specific states and tasks. Connected to our need to acquire and maintain well-being.
Control: Gaining mastery or control over the self, others, the world, situations, etc.
Like Archetype Theory, Deep Metaphors are a powerful tool that allow a framework to organize ideas around — refining and focusing your message so that it can speak in the most concentrated way possible. But a second, key take-away from Zaltman’s work with Deep Metaphors is that we are ultimately more alike than we are different. While we tend to see difference and diversity around us, on the subconscious level these divisions are largely immaterial. Zaltman suggests then that Deep Metaphors are part of the solution to many of the pitfalls of audience segmentation.
As marketers try to target their customers more directly, they increasingly segment that audience, often leading to over-diversification. In effect, as the audience is splintered, the approaches to reach them likewise splinter (and surely as new thinking in film follows the same strategy, the same problems will arise). Deep Metaphors allow a potential way around this — allowing us to refine and focus our message in the ways we are the same, rather than the ways we are different. If your plan is to reach diverse audience segments, the core of your message (and all the ways it is presented) still need to form a unified whole, one that speaks to the inner desires of that audience, regardless of their apparent differences. Deep Metaphors represent a possible beginning to that process.
Notes
1. Of Zaltman’s available books, I would recommend How Customers Think for its discussion of Deep Metaphors and its numerous insights into customer behavior. Marketing Metaphoria deals almost exclusively with the Deep Metaphors themselves and while useful is of more focused interest.
2. We are more emotional than rational, which means that when presenting the functional appeal of something you are wise to also emphasize the emotional. It’s one thing to say your movie is an award-winning romance, it’s another to say that it will make you feel like falling in love for the first time.
3. These are the “Big Seven” Deep Metaphors. There are a variety of smaller, less common, but still important ones, such as Motion, Force, Nature, and System. Marketing Metaphoria discusses many of these. See here for my previous notes about the Campfire Metaphor and Social Media. Like Archetype Theory, individual Deep Metaphors are neither positive nor negative. They represent large primal abstractions of ideas, and thus are largely dialectical in the meanings they embody.
Previously: Casting, Celebrities, and Archetype Theory
Next Week: The Hare Hypothesis
Nobody Knows Anything is a speculative journey through the more esoteric theories of popular culture: what that means, what comes next, and what can be done about it.
Charles Peirce is a screenwriter and musician, with an active interest in marketing, behavorial psychology and strategy. He finds it odd to talk about himself in the third person. He can be reached at ctcpeirce@gmail.com or via twitter @ctcpeirce.
