Impact of Advertising Metaphor on Consumer Belief: Delineating the Contribution of Comparison Versus Deviation Factors

The linguistics literature argues that different meanings can be conveyed by different metaphors, and that the meaning content so conveyed will structure the perceptions of message recipients in profoundly different ways. We set out to measure the impact of varying metaphor content within an advertising context on consumer beliefs. We report an experiment that isolates the effect of metaphor, which is a function of cross-domain comparison, from the effect of figurativeness, which is a function of artful deviation. We find that only a highly figurative metaphor is able to alter specific consumer beliefs under conditions of incidental ad exposure. Consumers who have a high degree of ability to process metaphors are an exception to this rule; in their case, metaphors, whether figurative or not, did alter beliefs. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.