Sözel Metaforlar: Tanımlar ve Reklam Uygulamaları

Verbal Metaphors: Definitions and Applications in Advertising

abstract

We live with metaphors, as Lakoff put it, and most of the time we don't even notice them. When someone says your arguments are indefensible or that their criticism hit the target, they're talking about a discussion as if it were a war.

So this paper is about those verbal metaphors, how to spot them and what advertising does with them. It opens with Harari's Sapiens and the cognitive revolution, because what makes human communication different is sharing meaning, not only passing information around.

Then it defines verbal metaphors and shows how they're identified at different depths. There are conceptual metaphors, deep metaphors (balance, transformation, journey, container, connection, resource and control) and metaphors at the scale of a single word or sentence.

The second half moves to advertising, with examples like an old WordStar ad. It looks at verbal metaphors through five lenses, which are attitude, persuasion, habits, the message itself and perception. And in all of them, the main factor is how the person receiving the message processes it in their head.

The conclusion explains that with a distribution analogy. A product that's a bit hard to get can feel more valuable, but if it's too hard, nobody even knows it exists.

So a metaphor in an ad should ask for some effort from the reader, just not too much. I wrote it in Turkish during my Ph.D. studies.

read the pdf (Turkish)