Marketing Metaphoria

6

Container

How Inclusion, Exclusion, and Other Boundaries Affect Consumer Thinking

The container deep metaphor involves physical, psychological, and social states and sometimes a combination of all three. Containers perform two basic functions: they keep things in and keep things out and they are pervasive. Gated residential communities and border fences form clearly defined physical barriers intended to provide a sense of security or, as some remember for the Berlin Wall, of imprisonment. The old phrase “You are what you eat” is a caution that what enters your body (among our earliest associations with container) defines both its status and even that of another powerful container, one’s self-identity.

Similarly, theatrical productions occur ...