Marketing Is All About Frames, So Put Your Products In the Picture

04/01/10

By Doug Richard

George Lakoff, a Berkeley cognitive linguist with a particular interest in politics, has made a fairly remarkable discovery. People buy their identities. This is true in two senses, people purchase products, services, policies and politicians that are consistent with their view of themselves and the world they live in, and they build the identities people see and create the environment around them by making economic and political decisions. Lakoff uses the term "frames" to describe these meaningful pictures we have of ourselves and the world. Frames are metaphorical, emotionally charged, moving images. They are populated...

...with people and objects and they represent interlocking and interdependent stories that govern human behavior.

For example, in a Hospital frame, there are doctors, nurses and people which have very clearly defined levels of authority. These people also have assigned "duties" that are strictly enforced. The patient must need help, the nurse must provide care, the doctor must solve problems and make decisions. Within a hospital there are various location-based scenarios. There's the surgery, the psych ward, the labor and delivery room, all of which call upon people to behave in very specific ways.

Entrepreneurs can call upon frames to communicate with their customers. For example, if you run a computer repair shop, you might run ads featuring a repairman dressed as a doctor with a laptop sitting on an examining table. That single image would communicate several aspects of your business very quickly. People bring you sick machines and you fix them. If you delivered repair services on site you might have to change your image to show your Emergency Medical Technician sitting in an ambulance treating the broken machine.

In order to use frames effectively, you need to know your target market very well. You... continued on page two >

 

 

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