Books about Metaphor from Amazon.com

Why do advertising campaigns and new products often fail? Why do consumers feel that companies don't understand their needs? Because marketers themselves don't think deeply about consumers' innermost thoughts and feelings. Marketing Metaphoria is a groundbreaking book that reveals how to overcome this "depth deficit" and find the universal drivers of human behavior so vital to a firm's success.



Marketing Metaphoria reveals the powerful unconscious viewing lenses--called "deep metaphors"-- that shape what people think, hear, say, and do.



Drawing on thousands of one-on-one interviews in more than thirty countries, Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman describe how some of the world's most successful companies as well as small firms, not-for-profits, and social enterprises have successfully leveraged deep metaphors to solve a wide variety of marketing problems. Marketing Metaphoria should convince you that everything consumers think and do is influenced at unconscious levels--and it will give you access to those deeper levels of thinking.

"An imaginative and insightful application of cognitive science to the world of business, rich with implications for both fields."

-Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, and author, How the Mind Works and The Stuff of Thought.

"Marketing Metaphoria is one of the most fascinating business books I have read in a long time. A brilliant combination of deep insight and actionable advice, it will forever change how you think about marketing."

-Daniel H. Pink, author, A Whole New Mind

"Despite the availability of increasingly sophisticated methods, most customer relationships remain standardized, superficial, and lacking in informed customization. Through deep metaphors, the Zaltmans provide an insightful and provocative framework for identifying and learning from the implicit cognitive influences on customer decision making that can enhance and deepen intimacy and loyalty."

-Gary W. Loveman, Chairman, CEO and President, Harrah's Entertainment, Inc.

"Any business seeking to build global brands should read the Zaltmans' groundbreaking work on metaphors. The universal power of deep metaphors crosses borders and generations, and enduring brands trade off this thinking, whether their owners know it or not."

-Tom Long, President and CEO, Miller Brewing Company

"A disruptive book that will change how you think about customer insights. The emotional power offered within these pages will energize you to dig deeper into your business and turn thin functional insights into rich emotional messages that will propel your business."

-Donna J. Sturgess, Global Head of Innovation, GlaxoSmithKline

"With the profound advances in psychology and neuroscience over the past two decades, I'm convinced that now is the time for practitioners to rewrite the 'principles of marketing.' Marketing Metaphoria transforms insights from the authors' research into a rich framework that will help you think more deeply about your consumers and develop more innovative ideas for action. Read it twice, then keep it on your desk for ready reference."

-Bob Woodard, Vice President, Global Consumer and Customer Insights, Campbell Soup Company.
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Reading the Bible Again for the First Time is Marcus Borg's follow-up to Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Like his earlier book, this one is written for lay people whose faith has been frustrated by their misapprehension that fundamentalism's claim to be the one true faith is valid. Borg, a professor of religion at Oregon State University, describes an alternative to fundamentalists' so-called "literal" readings of scripture. (He believes that such "literal-factual" readings do not live up to that description, and that the limitations of such readings have alienated many people who would otherwise remain part of the church.) Borg calls his alternative "historical-metaphorical" reading, a way of "taking the Bible seriously without taking it literally." Reading the Bible begins with a history of recent conflicts regarding biblical interpretation. Borg navigates the minefields of his subject with sensitivity and precision, explaining, for example, the important distinction between evangelical and fundamentalist readings of the Bible. He then offers historical-metaphorical readings of some key texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Throughout, Borg writes with calm assurance and respect for those who would disagree with him. Reading the Bible is a credible guide to the project it names. It is a faithful exercise of reason, undertaken to help Christians hear more clearly the many voices recorded in the Bible. --Michael Joseph Gross.
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As our culture shifts from modern to postmodern, pastors and church leaders are finding that old, rigid church leadership systems and structures no longer seem to work. Church leaders are searching for and discovering new, creative ways of leading--emphasizing intuition, creativity, narrative, and an embrace of the chaos and tension of our time. Tim Keel, pastor of a thriving emergent church and a rising leader in the emergent church movement, offers a thought-provoking yet practical exploration of this new style he calls Intuitive Leadership. His fresh approach will be welcomed by pastors and lay leaders interested in the emergent conversation and how Christian mission should look in our rapidly changing culture..
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Step-by-step guide to creating compelling, memorable presentations

A chart that once took ten hours to prepare can now be produced by anyone with ten minutes and a computer keyboard. What hasn't changed, however, are the basics behind creating a powerful visual - what to say, why to say it, and how to say it for the most impact. In Say It With Charts, Fourth Edition --the latest, cutting-edge edition of his best-selling presentation guide -- Gene Zelazny reveals time-tested tips for preparing effective presentations. Then, this presentation guru shows you how to combine those tips with today's hottest technologies for sharper, stronger visuals. Look to this comprehensive presentation encyclopedia for information on:

* How to prepare different types of charts -- pie, bar, column, line, or dot -- and when to use each
* Lettering size, color choice, appropriate chart types, and more
* Techniques for producing dramatic eVisuals using animation, scanned images, sound, video, and links to pertinent websites.
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Designed as a practical desktop reference, this book is the largest collection of hypnotic suggestions and metaphors ever compiled..
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All poets who take their jobs seriously spend a good deal of their time pondering death. Few, though, have logged as many hours as Thomas Lynch, who for 25 years has been a funeral director in Milford, Michigan. As might be expected from a writer who performs "daily stations with the local lately dead," Lynch's second essay collection, Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality, has a lot to say about both the current state of his industry (with its "Walmartized" funerals) and the attitude Americans have toward death, which is more or less to pretend it doesn't exist and to hope it never happens to us or anyone we know. Of course, this leads to our inability to properly understand life. And we become one of those stunned mumblers whom the author has spent a lifetime consoling and selling caskets to at Lynch & Sons.

As in his previous collection, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, Lynch muses on contemporary American life with an appealing mix of light and dark. The effect can be striking, especially in his essays on the death of a crafty old gravedigger; the alcoholism he inherited from his father and, devastatingly, watches develop in his son; his divorce and the wicked poem he later writes about his ex-wife. His prose is always lively, though in several essays he relies on the same cultural touchstones--Bill Gates, the Internet, his Catholic-school upbringing and the "wonderful breasts" of the nuns, and (oddly) the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song "Love the One You're With." More unfortunately, he can lapse into familiar generalizations of the "we boomers" or "as an Irish Catholic" variety. Then again, funeral directors must keep an eye on the habits and statistics of generations and groups (as Lynch puts it, "our favorite parlor game is Demographics and Expectancies"), so perhaps a few familiar generalities are excusable--an occupational hazard of the poet-essayist-mortician. In Lynch's case (and there probably isn't another), they seem a fair exchange for his entertaining and often surprisingly humble wisdom. --John Ponyicsanyi.
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