Exploring Metaphors and Metaphorical Reasoning for Developing Marketing Thought and Practice: An Abstract

Abstract

Metaphors and metaphorical thinking have enriched business management in general, but have hardly impacted marketing management even though marketing as science, theory, and practice could benefit from metaphors more than other disciplines in management. This paper explores the rich potential of metaphors, root metaphors, and metaphorical thinking and reasoning as an overarching methodology for developing marketing theory.

In this context, we first review the three major theories of metaphor origins – the comparison theory, the semantic interaction-tension theory, and the cognitive theory – for developing metaphoric thinking and reasoning in marketing. The comparison theory focuses on metaphors being a matter of words, as a deviant from normal literal usage, and is based on the similarities between two things. However, it has been argued that this theory ignores the crucial role of differences. This gave rise to the semantic interaction-tension theory, which introduced the notion of tension to describe the literal incompatibility relationship between the subject and that which embellishes it.

While the semantic interaction-tension theory was an improvement over the comparison theory, it did not solve the issue of transition from literal incongruence to metaphorical congruence between two semantic fields. Thus, the cognitive theory argued that metaphor usage is not only emotive, but a cognitively potential vehicle of knowledge possessing special meaning other than the literal meaning and reading of text. In sum, a metaphor should not only encourage a premature analytical closure (and thus knowledge dissemination) by emphasizing similarity, but also work on tension that dissimilarities create for knowledge generation.

Next, in our search for a suitable root metaphor for use in marketing, we formulate several research propositions to illustrate the sub-metaphor producer-consumer relationship under the root metaphor of the Free Enterprise Capital System.

Finally, along each of the three theories of metaphor origins we extract layers of metaphorical utterances that we label as zero-order data sentences, first-order theory sentences, and second-order value sentences that indicate higher layers of conceptual and theoretical richness in marketing science. We discuss managerial implications, limitations, and new directions for research.