Metaphors in Advertising

Metaphors in Advertising
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Metaphors in Advertising
Metaphors have been historically used by marketers to achieve various objectives, including attracting attention, influencing customer beliefs and attitudes, and evoking imagery. The use of metaphor in advertising has been extensively studied. However, most of the studies have focused on visual metaphors where imagery has been used to evoke certain images and perceptions. There have also been studies on how metaphors in advertising shape a brand (Dehay & Landwehr, 2019). In this research, the focus will be on a research gap on brand personality, which described how a firm shape the way people feel about its products or services. The thesis statement for this research is that metaphors can be used as a brand character to be used as a vehicle to express brand personality and facilitate the brand storytelling approach. The approach to this research is a case study on a selected brand, Red Bull, which has successfully deployed metaphors in creating and maintaining its brand personality of excitement and adventure.
Literature Review
Metaphors in advertising is a common research topic that allows researchers to explore how consumers' attitudes are changed and formed through various advertising elements. Among the most common forms of metaphors studied is visual metaphors, which entails the use of visual elements in ads to generate a positive ad recall. The three main reasons for using visual metaphors as described by Kim and Kim (2019) are attention, pleasure, and elaboration. Many brands will visual metaphors to evoke the feeling of a pleasurable experience. Others will be seeking to create a short-term buzz through immediate attention while others will be seeking to offer demonstrations of elaborations regarding the product or service. Regardless of the usage, the current literature shows that using metaphors helps expand dimensional thinking, enhances responses, and leads to more extensive processing of the ads (Dehay & Landwehr, 2019). How a brand is perceived by consumers can be shaped by the metaphors used in advertising.
Metaphors serve various purposes when used across different contexts. However, the primary objective is usually to shape how a certain message is received by the audience. For example, climate change has been a major concern for countries across the world and governments have tried to get people involved and engaged in creating a solution. However, as the public remained relatively unmoved, the decision to use the metaphor of “the war” or “race” against climate change has made people perceive more risk and urgency in climate change (Flusberg et al., 2017). Similarly, marketers use metaphors in advertising to engage the consumer and evoke positive responses to the adverts (Zhao & Lin, 2019). In many cases, the metaphors seek to amplify a description of a compliment given to a product or service. The question of brand personality is also critically important, even though this stream of research remains relatively limited. Metaphors are strategically used to shape brand personality, especially utilitarian products. As such, five areas of personality are refl...