The meaning of an image in isolation is very limited. The context and the words that go with it are what give it its full meaning. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince, the Little Prince rejects all the narrator’s attempts to draw a picture of a sheep, until the exasperated narrator finally draws a box and tells him "the sheep is inside."

The MetaforteTM method is about pictures and words together. It presents images to respondents, who select spontaneously among them, then explore the feelings and reasons behind their selection. It’s in the relationship between words and images that respondents’ spontaneous opinions can be teased out. And when you analyze hundreds of respondent comments on the same images, your understanding of those opinions becomes clear and stable. The results are a stable, nonempirical measure of spontaneous, unconscious choices.

One sheep is great. But a herd is better.

In individual interviews conducted for metaphoric analysis, subjects are invited to take a few hours to select images and put them together into a whole. They produce a collage representing their feelings about a given brand. The scientific literature analyzes hundreds of such collages, yielding a system for classifying the most frequently occurring metaphors.

The MetaforteTM approach is based on that work, but with the additional supposition that spontaneity has to figure more prominently in the equation. That’s why this cognitive research system presents respondents with images from a set of 84, representing the principal metaphors from the scientific literature. The system records not only the image that respondents select in their responses, but also their response time, which is then used as an indicator of relative spontaneity.

This means that images selected more quickly than the average response time are given more weight in the analysis. Advertising and marketing are all about getting consumers to respond to stimuli. Isn’t it high time research took this into account?