I am still not sure if this is very interesting or very creepy, but let me briefly describe it. Marketing guru Gerald Zaltman has developed a technique over the years called Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) which gets consumers to express their deepest feelings and thoughts about a brand or product -whether they want to or not- via an encounter which goes through a series of phases.
ZMET uses visual and non-visual images gathered and/or generated by consumers to elicit and probe the metaphors that represent consumers’ thoughts and feelings about a topic.
Images are important units of analysis for marketing managers. When augmented by consumers’ explanations during careful probing by an interviewer, the images provide a clear idea of what consumers really think and feel. Almost invariably these insights are far deeper and more clear than the insights of verbal discussions alone. Although many images are visual, images may take other forms (tactile, olfactory, auditory…). Whatever the form (technically, every image is a neural activation), an image represents a thought or feeling consumers have about, say, privacy, treating heartburn and indigestion, or the meaning of art in their daily lives, or what they think a company thinks of them. Therefore, images are referred to as metaphors.
A metaphor is the representation of one thing (a thought, feeling, action) in terms of another thing (a picture of someone screaming, a swimming pool, the color blue…). During a ZMET interview, verbal descriptions of the thoughts and feelings represented by these images are collected to help researchers understand their meaning. Strong evidence exists that these verbal descriptions are far more complete and far more useful to managers because they were stimulated initially by these images (or metaphors).
I am not sure if I would call this ”a well developed research technique” or just a methodology that gives me the creeps. Of course it’s a technique that, beyond consumer products, can be extrapolated to all forms of information individuals receive, making it easier for marketers to lure us into a less cerebral approach to the social and informational environment. Intrestingly enough, if it is true that 95% of thought is unconscious, or as Zaltman calls it, “hidden knowledge”, I can only guess that it’s so very easy to guide us in one way or the other.
Tags: brand development, brand research, images, Jerry Zaltman, metaphors, product development, senses, Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, ZMET
March 31, 2009 at 8:37 pm
I am listening to Zaltman speak live at the ARG Conference as I write this on Scribe Live.
Knowing this added information about his company and its research techniques creates a more in depth understanding of “his subjects”……which is us. And yes it is creepy.
He says there are 3 fundamentals deep metaphors now in America.
Mostly about the economy and money and how the United States is changing and is not the same United States and how the American Dream is dying.