I used to think visual metaphors in advertising were just clever shortcuts—like, the brand couldn’t explain their product properly so they showed you an image instead.
Turns out I was completely wrong, or at least mostly wrong, because the science behind how our brains process metaphorical imagery is way more fascinating than I gave it credit for. When you see an Apple logo with a bite taken out of it, your brain isn’t just registering “computer company”—it’s firing off associations about knowledge, temptation, simplicity, maybe even that whole Garden of Eden thing if you’re feeling literary. Neuroscientist Gilles Fauconnier spent roughly two decades studying conceptual blending theory, which basically argues that our minds constantly merge different mental spaces to create meaning. Visual metaphors in branding exploit this neural tendency, creating what he calls “emergent structure”—new meanings that didn’t exist in either the image or the concept alone. I’ve seen this play out in focus groups where people can’t articulate why they trust a brand, but they do, and it usually traces back to some visual metaphor they absorbed without realizing it.
The thing is, not all metaphors stick. Research from the Journal of Consumer Psychology (2019) found that metaphors work best when they’re what they call “moderately discrepant”—weird enough to be interesting, familiar enough to be understood quickly. Too obvious and people forget them immediately; too abstract and people just get confused or irritated.
Why Your Brain Treats Visual Metaphors Like Actual Experiences, Sort Of
Here’s the thing: when you look at a visual metaphor, your brain doesn’t file it away as “symbolic representation.”
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff—who literally wrote the book on metaphor theory—demonstrated that our brains process metaphorical images using the same neural pathways as direct experiences. Show someone an ad with a car “hugging” a mountain road, and their motor cortex actually activates slightly, as if they’re experiencing that curve themselves. It’s wild, honestly. This is why Red Bull’s “gives you wings” campaign worked so brilliantly for, what, almost thirty years now? Your brain doesn’t think “this is obviously false advertising”—it experiences the sensation of elevation, freedom, energy. The visual metaphor bypasses your logical skepticism and goes straight for the experiential processing centers. A 2021 study from Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab found that ads using embodied metaphors (metaphors tied to physical sensations) increased brand recall by 34% compared to literal descriptions of the same products.
Wait—maybe that’s why so many tech companies use metaphors of speed, even when speed isn’t their main feature?
The Uncomfortable Truth About Metaphorical Consistency and Brand Memory Architecture
Marketing professor Jennifer Aaker at Stanford has this whole framework about brand personality, and visual metaphors are basically the shorthand for establishing it. But here’s where it gets tricky: brands need metaphorical consistency over time, which sounds simple but is aparently incredibly hard to maintain. I say “apparently” because I’ve watched companies completely abandon their visual metaphor systems during rebrands, then wonder why customer loyalty tanks. The human brain craves pattern recognition—we’re basically pattern-obsessed organisms—and when a brand’s visual metaphor suddenly shifts from, say, natural/organic imagery to sleek/technological imagery, our brains register it as a threat or at minimum a disruption. There’s this concept in cognitive psychology called “processing fluency,” which is just a fancy way of saying our brains prefer information that’s easy to process. Familiar visual metaphors have high processing fluency. Novel ones require cognitive effort. That effort can work in your favor if the metaphor is delightfully surprising, but it can also backfire spectacularly if people are tired, distracted, or just not in the mood for your clever visual puzzle.
Mailchimp’s monkey mascot wearing a hat is a perfect example—it’s absurd, but it’s been consistent since roughly 2001, give or take, and now it signals “friendly email marketing” to millions of people without any words at all.
I guess what frustrates me is how many brands treat visual metaphors as decorative rather than structural. They’re not decoration. They’re doing serious cognitive work.
When Visual Metaphors Fail Spectacularly Across Cultural and Contextual Boundaries
Cultural context is where even the smartest metaphors can absolutely fall apart.
What reads as “sophisticated luxury” in one market might read as “cold and alienating” in another. I remember reading about Chevrolet’s Nova supposedly failing in Spanish-speaking markets because “no va” means “doesn’t go”—that story’s actually mostly myth, but the principle holds. Visual metaphors are even more vulnerable to cultural misinterpretation than linguistic ones because we assume images are universal. They’re definately not. Colors, animals, gestures, spatial relationships—all of these carry wildly different metaphorical meanings depending on cultural context. A 2020 meta-analysis in the International Journal of Advertising reviewed 147 studies on cross-cultural ad effectiveness and found that metaphorical ads had higher variance in effectiveness across cultures than literal ads. The best-performing global campaigns used what researchers called “archetypal metaphors”—things like journeys, transformations, containers—that appear in storytelling traditions across most human cultures. Airbnb’s “belong anywhere” campaign worked globally because the visual metaphor of home/belonging is pretty much universally understood, even if the specific imagery varied by region.
Anyway, the real skill isn’t just creating a clever visual metaphor—it’s creating one that does cognitive work efficiently, stays consistent enough to build memory structures, and translates across the contexts where your audience actually lives. That’s harder than it sounds, and honestly, most brands never quite figure it out.
