How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market

349 Pages·2003·10.447 MB·English

by  Gerald Zaltman

GERALD ZALTMAN
H A R V A R D B U S I N E S S S C H O O L P R E S S
$29.95
A NEW APPROACH TO
UNDERSTANDING HOW-AND
MWK—CUSTOMERS BUY
Despite the resources spent on market
research, nearly 80 percent of new offerings
fail. The pattern is predictable: Customers say
they want something, companies create it, and
once it's available, customers don't buy it.
Why? Is it because customers just don't know
what they want? Gerald Zaltman sorts 4
through this puzzle and concludes that,
at some level, customers do know, but
marketing's most overused tools—surveys,
f
questionnaires, and focus groups—and
conventional thinking don't dig deeply
enough to help them discover and express it.
In this mind-opening book, Zaltman argues
that 95 percent of thinking happens in our
unconscious. Therefore, unearthing your
customers' desires requires you to understand
the "mind of the market," that dynamic interplay
between the consumers' and the marketers'
thoughts that determines the outcome of every
buying decision.
Building on research from disciplines as diverse
as neurology, sociology, literary analysis, and
cognitive science, Zaltman offers rich insights
into what happens within the complex system
of mind, brain, body, and society as consumers
contemplate'their needs and evaluate products.
Continued on back flap
HOW CUSTOMERS THINK

Gerald Zaltman
HOW CUSTOMERS THINK
Essential Insights into the
Mind of the Market
Harvard Business School Press
Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright 2003 Gerald Zaltman
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
07 06 05 04 03 54
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without prior permission of the publisher.
Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or
mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston,
Massachusetts 02163.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zaltman, Gerald.
How customers think : essential insights into the mind of the market /
Gerald Zaltman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57851-826-1 (alk. paper)
1. Consumer behavior—Psychological aspects. 2. Consumers—Psychology.
3. Marketing—Psychological aspects. 4. Creative thinking. I. Title.
HF5415.32 .Z35 2003
658.8'342—dc21
2002011666
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and
Archives Z39.48-1992.
To all my doctoral students
Contents
Preface ix
Part I Preparing for an Expedition
One A Voyage from the Familiar 3
Two A Voyage to New Frontiers 27
Part il Understanding the Mind of the Market
Three Illuminating the Mind 47
Consumers’ Cognitive Unconscious
Four Interviewing the Mind/Brain 73
Metaphor Elicitation
Appendix: The Metaphor-Elicitation Process 101
Five Interviewing the Mind/Brain 111
Response Latency and Neuroimaging
Six Come to Think of It 129
Seven Reading the Mind of the Market 149
Using Consensus Maps
Eight Memory’s Fragile Power 165
riii I Contents
Nine Memory, Metaphor, and Stories 189
Ten Stories and Brands 211
Part III Thinking Differently and Deeply
Eleven Crowbars for Creative Thinking 237
Twelve Quality Questions Beget Quality Answers 263
Thirteen Launching a New Mind-Set 285
Notes 291
Index 311
Acknowledgments 319
About the Author 323
Preface
Neither art nor science stands still in representing
our visible and invisible worlds. Marketing, as both art
and science, can’t stand still either.
Peter drucker, arguably the leading observer of manage­
ment today, suggests that businesspeople stand on the
threshold of the “knowledge society.” In this society, a company’s com­
petitive advantage will come from an historically underdeveloped asset:
the ability to capture and apply insights from diverse fields, not just
from business. Drucker notes that many CEOs of large U.S. firms who
were “appointed in the past ten years were fired as failures within a year
or two,” partly for not cultivating this asset.1 Their failures ultimately
resulted from woefully flawed paradigms for navigating an increasingly
precarious environment—a situation not unlike that of the crew on the
Titanic. Indeed, most marketing managers operate from a paradigm—a
set of assumptions about how the world works—that prevents them
from understanding and serving customers effectively.
Elliot Ettenberg, chief executive officer of Customer Strategies
Worldwide LLC in New York City, summarized the current state of
affairs in a recent article published in The Economist. In Ettenberg’s
words, “Everything else has been reinvented—distribution, new prod­
uct development, the supply chain. But marketing is stuck in the past.”2
The article argues that a far deeper and better understanding of con­
sumers is “a much harder task than describing the virtues of a product.
While consumers have changed beyond recognition, marketing has
ix