| Theodore Levitt, former poet laureate of marketing scholarship (Aherne, 2006), once claimed that “the metaphor makes the sale”. Dating from an era when hard-core marketing science held sway, Levitt’s (1981, p. 96) statement was designed to provoke, to unsettle and to throw a figurative spanner in the works. By making the point that metaphor, simile and similar literary devices have an important part to play in marketing principles and practice, he was suggesting that our field suffers from multivariate myopia, a misplaced belief in the significance of statistics. Although Levitt’s irreverent remarks predated the “paradigm wars” (Kavanagh, 1994) of the “postmodern turn” (Sherry, 1991), they were a whisper on the wind of marketing thought. Nowadays it is widely accepted that metaphor is central to marketing understanding, that rhetorical devices, figurative language and literary criticism are an integral part of our discipline (Miles, 2010, 2014). According to Kitchen (2008), viral marketing, the PLC, marketing-as-warfare, portfolio matrices, globalisation, segmentation, relationship marketing, the marketing mix, integrated marketing communications, marketing planning models, buyer behaviour models, hierarchy-of-effects models and several other stalwarts of the standard textbooks are rock-solid proof of marketing’s metaphorical foundations. And Kitchen’s not the only one or the most recent. From Arndt (1985) and Rosenberg’s (1984) early analyses, through the combative interventions of Hunt and Menon (1995a, 1995b), via Zaltman’s (1997, 2003) patented, packaged and premium-priced ZMET method, to Rojas Gaviria’s (2016) putative programme of “poetic projection”, a steady stream of metaphor-oriented articles has flowed into marketing’s ever-deepening conceptual reservoir (Belk et al., 2003; Bouillé et al., 2016; Capelli and Jolibert, 2009; Cornelissen, 2003; Fillis and Rentschler, 2006, 2008; Henry, 2005; Hirschman, 2007; Joy and Sherry, 2003; O’Malley et al., 2008; Rentschler et al., 2012; Sundar and Noseworthy, 2014; Tuominen, 2007; von Wallpach and Kreuzer, 2013). |
