How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market by Gerald Zaltman @ .::ManagementOnly.com::.

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

Gerald Zaltman

Customer Services

Sales rank 71,107 Customers rating

(based on 48 reviews)

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

A New Approach to Understanding How-and Why-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 through this puzzle and concludes that, at some level, customers do know, but marketing's most overused tools-surveys, 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. Zaltman illustrates how leading companies are "mining the unconscious" "-with remarkable results, and introduces innovative tools and techniques that help marketers:

* Develop research questions that speak to the unconscious brain.

* Evoke valuable meaning through a customer's metaphors-and instill those images in brand communications.

* Measure consumer reactions to marketing stimuli-and alter advertising or positioning strategies accordingly.

* Build "consensus maps" that reflect a market segment's universal thinking-and reengineer them to boost customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales.

* Understand how their own minds work-and how they can think in creative new ways.

The mind of the market is waiting to be explored. Make sure your competitors don't get there first.

BACK JACKET: "If you read this book carefully and actively, then you will never approach the disciplines of consumer behavior or market intelligence the same way again."-Anil Menon, Vice President, Worldwide Market Intelligence & Brand Strategy, IBM Corporation

"This book is an enlightening convergence of business theory, case study analysis, brain science, and human nature. Zaltman is to be commended for his vision and creativity. His work in marketing innovation is the most significant to come along in some time."-Robert S. Scalea, Chief Strategy Officer, J. Walter Thompson, North America

"How Customers Think moves easily among the data stores of brain science to make a powerfully compelling case that the world of marketing research cannot afford to ignore. Zaltman lucidly plucks some of the most intriguing and profound insights from our knowledge explosion today."-Kenneth S. Kosik, M.D., Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School

"Finally, a practical perspective on marketing that answers the question, 'Why haven't our approaches been working all these years?' How Customers Think clearly articulates why focus groups and traditional customer surveys fail to deliver competitive advantage. While the book delineates the significant limits of our 'legacy techniques,' it provides an equally clear action plan for delivering bankable insights. These ideas will turn marketing and research on its heels."-William L. McComb, President, McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals

"The insight that companies need multidisciplinary science to fully comprehend and act upon customer behavior should factor heavily into any business leader's strategic planning process. This more holistic approach opens new and superior avenues to create competitive advantages in the never-ending fight for the customer's loyalty. Zaltman's book is invaluable to any CEO or marketing professional devoted to excellence."-Lars Pettersson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Sandvik AB

Publisher	Harvard Business Press
Release date	02/2003
Availability	Usually ships in 24 hours
Edition	Hardcover

List price	$32.95
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Paging Dr. Freud: Zaltman lays the blame for new-product failures directly at the feet of marketers. "The world has changed, but our methods for understanding consumers have not. We keep relying on familiar but ineffective research techniques and consequently... (@ CIO Insight)

Comments by amazon customers about How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market

Great marketing food for thought
Zaltman's How Customers Think provides an easy-to-read work on consumer behaviour and market research. Illustrated with anecdotes from a range of brands Zaltman talks through the benefits and pitfalls of different research methods, together examples of the `law of unintended consequences'. Its a really easy read, I hammered through it on a business trip to Glasgow.

A Deep Dive Into The Unconscious Mind
At the core of this book is a process called ZMET that uses patented research techniques to identify deep metaphors people apply to daily situations. For example, thoughts about working-out could revolve around "anticipation, companionship, and self-esteem." This trio of concepts can then guide product development and marketing communications. I've had the good fortune to help redesign customer experience using ZMET research, and the technique is simple and powerful. The book itself is academic and wanders around more than a bit, but there are pleasant surprises at every turn. For example, Zaltman outlines three primary research errors: 1. Mistaking Descriptions for Insight 2. Confusing Data With Understanding 3. Focusing On The Wrong Elements Of Study He also makes a persuasive case for 1:1 interviews instead of focus groups, and I agree with him here. In-depth interviews are my preferred research method for most situations. He supports this 1:1 method with research indicating that the outside limit for effective small group communication is three people. Zaltman also presses the case that 95% of our thoughts are unconscious, and that marketers rely too heavily on people's purported understanding of themselves (i.e., the 5% of conscious thought). He argues that people are driven by an inner world of images, stories, metaphors, and ultimately, emotions. While people report on their inner worlds with words, Zaltman argues that too often marketers take these words at face value, which is a mistake, for there is a low correlation between what people say they'll do and what they actually do. More often than not, he believes customers use unconscious mental models to sort the stimulus that comes their way. Ultimately, this book is about unearthing the unconscious metaphors that lead to conscious behavior, and then finding the right types of stimuli to influence that behavior. If anything, this book will help marketers become more perceptive in discovering how customers think.

Essential Tools for Positioning & Customer Experience Improvement
If a picture tells 1,000 words, and the average person uses 5-6 metaphors per minute, then typical market research is just hitting the tip of the iceberg in accessing the 5,000+ wpm that customers process internally. Zaltman shows how to tap into the subconscious and nonverbal elements by using metaphor-based research methods. The 1st part of the book contains a lot of neat facts although it is written in a rather academic style, but the middle section gives how-to and examples of metaphor-based research. Overall I found the book to be eye-opening, thorough, and useful ... in fact, essential for superior brand/product positioning and customer experience improvement. For a quick read on driving progress of customer programs I also recommend this book with step-by-step tips: Metrics You Can Manage For Success and Customer Experience Improvement Momentum.

Talks a lot about insight but doesn't deliver much.
Disappointing. If you have read some bestsellers touching on with recent findings in neuroscience (e.g. Antonio Damasio) and memory (e.g. Daniel Schacter) then what's left of this book for you is largely an advertisement for Zaltman's commercial and patented (!!) market research technique called 'Zaltman's metaphor elicitation'. Yes there are good reasons to doubt focus groups (more reasons than Zaltman discusses), as well as management intuition, and market research that asks consumers why they bought what they bought. But that doesn't mean we need to resort to Zaltman's consultancy which bears a strong resemblance to some of the excesses of 1960s motivational research. Anyway Zaltman makes a very poor case for this logical leap, he really presents it as a fait accompli (I believe so so should you). For marketing managers the greatest weakness of this book is the lack of integration with known facts of buying behaviour. The discoveries of even 20th Century marketing science are ignored. So there are no facts in this book about how consumers actually buy, or consume media. And so such facts aren't used as a check against Gerry's ideas. Indeed there is no testing of any ideas. The marketing examples are purely anecdotal, and often very vague - suggesting a lack of first-hand knowledge (they read as if they were mentioned by 3rd parties to the author at the end of a seminar or over a chat). I can't recall anything convincing about sales results, or anything public that could be externally validated, the anecdotes have to be taken on trust. Even so, surprisingly, they tend to make very weak vague claims: e.g. "managers at Coca-Cola's German office found that new research on memory contradicted many of their prevailing assumptions about how memory worked and how to design effective advertising campaigns. By applying several key findings about memory.. [they] launched a successful marketing program in that country." You don't say, wow ! What assumptions, what research, what sort of advertising program ? All we readers get is: "Specifically, the company created more meaning (sic) and effective advertising by understanding the reconstructive nature of memory and the various factors affecting the encoding and retrieval of memory". It would perhaps be acceptable if that sort of anecdote came at the start of the book - you'd expect more exciting, harder, detailed evidence to come later once the reader was familiar with the book's key concepts. But this example comes from page 258 - this sort of feeble anecdote is about as good as it gets as far as evidence that this book has any real-world application value. As other reviewers have noted it's also an overly long rather abstract book, with somewhat indulgent structure, for example the third part is about management thinking not "how customers think". This book talks a lot about insight but doesn't deliver much.

Warmed over goulash of random marketing findings
This is a disjointed, rambling and under-edited compendium of topics from market research. The author swings from brand development to product development to service experience as if they were fundamentally about the same thing. The number of U.S. automotive examples in the book is truly dispiriting since last time I checked, the market share loss was continuing unabated in spite of all of these allegedly successful studies. His section on focus group usefulness is far too negative. There are far better topic specific books on the market about brand, product development and service experience development. Buy those.