Don’t Blame it on the Metaphor: Marketing, Metaphors and Metamorphosis in the Internal Market

Abstract

I met the person who came out with this sentence a couple of years ago – to spare his blushes, let’s call him Babel. He proudly wore the label ‘Head of Organization Development’ and worked for a web-based financial services firm which had a reputation for funky marketing. He represented a truly maverick brand, much heralded for its iconoclastic, irreverent approach but which, unfortunately, also had an alternative financial performance record. I would show you a copy of their ‘strategy on a single page’ if I could, but suffice to say, looking at it for the first time was rather like being a Victorian explorer faced with a hieroglyphic carving on a stone tablet. This A4 tablet was packed with symbols and acronyms which might as well have been runes and had so many mixed metaphors that it looked as though it had been chiselled by an army of schizophrenic stonemasons.