I’ve recently read, Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers. Written by Professor Emeritus from Harvard, Gerald Zaltman and his son Lindsay, it is an exploration of what they have identified as the seven deep metaphors that influence what we think, hear, say and do.

What do visuals have to do with it?

The Zaltmans have developed a patented process, Zaltman Methaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET). It involves asking people to find photographs about their feelings toward something specific. Through structured interviews and working with a graphic designer, a collage image is digitally constructed about the topic. You can see some small pieces of the process in this video.

What stands out for me in this video, and as it did in the book is the description how often we are lead astray in our thinking by focusing on surface differences rather than searching for the significant similarities expressed in deep metaphors.

Three Levels of Metaphors

The Zaltmans describe three levels of metaphors, and use this example:

Surface Metaphors

• Money runs through his fingers
• I am drowning in debt
• Don’t pour your money down the drain
• The bank froze his assets

Metaphor Theme

• Money is like liquid

Deep Metaphor

• Resource

It is through understanding the deep metaphors that we understand the roots of our business challenges. Visual exploration identifies the subconscious drivers of behavior by helping us see the deep metaphors.

As I developed the VisualsSpeak ImageSet, we looked a lot at metaphor. In the testing of potential images, we found that the images that depicted surface metaphors did not inspire deep insights as readily as images that were more elemental. We decided to offer participants the opportunity to construct their own metaphors by providing a visual language set to do it with. This is one part of why we consistently hear people get new insights when they work with our tools.

Thinking Deeply

One of the more interesting articles coming from the publicity for the book was published by the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge Newsletter, Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply?.

In decrying the lack of what they call “deep thinking” among managers and especially those responsible for marketing, they suggest some things that get in its way. Among them are:

1. reluctance to take risk, especially when short-term performance is at stake,
2. the fear of disruption resulting from “thinking differently and deeply,”
3. the potential psychological cost of changing one’s mind resulting from deep thinking,
4. the lack of information providing deep insights on which to base deep thinking.

The articles inspired 136 comments. Many of comments pointed to the limitations of thinking embedded into the management levels of many organizations. Even more pointed to the perception of a lack of time. Yet, doesn’t it take way more time when an organization is not thinking deeply enough about what it is doing?

Why don’t managers use visuals to help them think?

Even though the ZMET uses visuals and words to uncover the core metaphors that drive customer behavior, a a major portion of this book is describing the seven metaphors. Might part of the problem be managers don’t have the visual thinking skills or access to the tools that allow for deep thinking? Seems there is an almost obsessive focus on finding the ‘answer’, but not so much on making sure the process used to get there can actually accommodate the scale of the issue.

Visual Thinking resources

In the past many of the resources for learning to use visual thinking have been scattered. There are a number of companies who work in the space across a wide range of price points, who take a range of approaches. Luckily, we now have Vizthink, which is helping to form a worldwide community of people who work in this space. The inaugural conference was held in Jan, and I was fortunate to participate as a facilitator and exhibitor. You can see the ways we used VisualsSpeak, graphic facilitation, and mind mapping to explore market position in this series of posts:

• Artrain’s Challenge
• VizThink Challege: Overview
• VizThink Challenge: Which images were used and why it matters
• VizThink Challenge: What the words tell us

The VizThink blog has series of webinars from leaders in the space including Dave Gray, David Sibbet, Nancy Duarte, Jamie Nast, and Chuck Frey. There is also a series of podcasts on a variety of visual topics.

For those who prefer to learn from books, here are some of the books you might start with. (Really I just wanted to put the interesting spinning visual on my blog, but these really are favorite books)

Other posts I have written on visual language include

• Discovering the essence of visuals
• Visual Language: Shape
• Visual Language: About Line
• Are your visuals saying what you want? Part 1 Visual Elements
• Are your visuals saying what you want? Part 2 Color & Contrast
• Are your visuals saying what you want? Part 3 Texture & Pattern

What can we do to get visuals in the hands of managers to help them think more deeply? What do you need to know in order to be willing to use visuals? What would help?