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

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

Jerry Zaltmanýs ýHow Customers Thinký offers fresh insights into why companies are increasingly frustrated by consumer research. Drawing on contemporary brain research, he exposes fatal flaws in the hallowed premise in traditional consumer research that asking customers about their motivations is the best way to get clues about their future behavior.

Zaltman points out that surveys, questionnaires and focus groups fail to get behind the curtains of consciousness. This can prove fatal for a marketing program because at least 90% of mental activity that leads to perceptions, thinking and decisions takes place outside the conscious mind.

However, traditional research and marketing largely ignores the contents of the unconscious mind. Why is this so, when contemporary brain research has learned that this is where motivations as well as perceptions and decisions originate? Because lacking an understanding of how minds work, researchers and marketers must depend by default on consumersý conscious rational responses. However, disconnects between what consumers consciously think and what they feel at deeper levels often lead to marketplace failure.

Zaltman reconnects the emotional, feeling dimension of consumersý minds (right brain as it were) with the perceiving, thinking (left brain) dimension of their minds to yield a holistic picture of customersý minds.

Marketing often fails expectations because undue attention is given the contents of the rational left brain that respondents disgorge in traditional consumer research. Zaltman observes that researchers and marketers widely ignore the deep shadowy realm of motivating emotions because it is easier to record, process and analyze what consumers say directly about their needs and motivations.

Zaltman observes that recent brain research shows that emotional arousal is essential to the generation of sustained interest in a matter. Brain patients whose emotional capabilities have been destroyed while still having normal reasoning powers cannot determine whether one brand or another is best for them. Brand loyalty, it seems, is determined more by emotional responses than by rational analysis.

Zaltman shows how to get better guidance than direct questioning of them yields about what will stir consumersý emotions. In doing this he addresses one of the most curious defects in traditional research and marketing: decisions are more often determined by the rules of statistical math than by tenets of behavior science. However, this should not be surprising because few marketers have grounding in how minds work. After all, a person can earn an MBA in marketing without a single course in behavior.

If the primary functional purpose of marketing is getting the attention of minds and influencing them to action, then it should follow that a deeper understanding of how minds work will make marketers more effective in doing that. However, with Zaltmanýs book in hand, one needs not go back to school for a degree in psychology to gain a practical understanding of how customersý minds work.

A word of caution, however: This book is to be studied, not scanned. It does not offer the simple, sound bite-sized solutions that are so commonplace in marketing books and that make them quickly forgettable. Zaltmanýs book will not be forgettable to any person who makes a study of his book because he/she will experience a quantum leap in understanding how customers think.


Refreshing new insights   May 2, 2003
Kathryn A. Braun (www.marketingmemories.com)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

This book is a must-read for marketing researchers, academics, managers, or anyone else interested in why we make the decisions we do. Dr. Zaltman has integrated the latest findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and sociology into an easy-to-read, but definitely thorough, discussion of how the brain works and consumers think. Zaltman accomplishes that task by providing real-life case studies coming from his years of experience as a consultant along with a well-summarized view of the underlying theories and evidence. His discussions about the role of the subconscious should result in a paradigm shift in marketing research. Anyone who has conducted a focus group or distributed a large-scale written survey and has been left with the feeling that there must be more going on, will be comforted by the fact their intuition was right (there is) but also troubled by the issue of how to gain more information from consumers. Zaltman's research method, Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET), is presented as a way for managers to "dig deeper" into both their own and their consumers' decision processes. This book provides detailed information about ZMET and how real managers have gained unique insights from its usage.

As both an academic memory researcher and consultant I was particularly impressed with Zaltman's coverage of the role of memory in consumer decision making, both with its frailty, making it subject to distortion on more traditional market research measures, and its depth, as in the role of storytelling and relationship to deep metaphors. On a practical note, Zaltman has integrated some features that make his book user-friendly, such as usage of pictures or images to demonstrate his points, summary tables that concisely articulate his ideas, a short glossary of terms that is helpful to the novice reader and an appendix on ZMET which includes good/bad examples of interviewing techniques. In addition to Zaltman's breakthrough coverage of content, he is also a gifted writer that is a pleasure to read. I highly recommend this book!


This is a Must-Read for all Market Research Professionals!   March 5, 2003
P. Mordigan Hawkins (Phoenix, AZ United States)
15 out of 17 found this review helpful

In his book, How Customers Think - Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market, Gerald Zaltman hits gold!

Professor Zaltman has expertly combined the disciplines of all the sciences to provide not only "rich insights", but equally as important, practical applications. It is essential that Market Research Professonals go beyond their "Suite of Tools" and explore the sub-conscious through Dr. Zaltman's sound methodology. At the very least, it should be addressed when outlining a preliminary research design.

As a market researcher for over 35 years, we've all been challenged by the mystery of how customers think...because, we know, that the sub-conscious rules and is difficult to measure. At last, we have an approach that I consider one of the best.

Companies today would be hard-pressed to explain why they haven't tried this approach to gain competitive advantage in the knowledge of their customer base.

I applaud Dr. Zaltman for publishing this book...and, will admit, have used his metaphor elicitation technique when tackling some very complex problems.

I urge market research professionals to take this book very seriously. It can make a difference!

Patricia Mordigan Hawkins
Private Consultant


Insights into the Mind of the Market   June 30, 2003
Craig L. Howe (Darien, CT United States)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

Every marketing manager wants to understand the consumer's thought process. Yet few succeed.

That is Gerald Zaltman, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard University's interdisciplinary Mind, Brian Behavior Initiative, message in this fascinating book. Marketers would like to think they control the image of their brands, but in reality it is brain and the mind of the consumer that controls an individual's brand perception.

To be effective, the author says, new marketing strategies will have to add neurology, musicology, philosophy and zoology to anthropology, psychology and sociology they currently use.

Many marketing managers handicap themselves by clinging to the following ideas:
* Consumers think in a rational way. In reality, Zaltman says, the selection process is affected by emotion, the subconscious and physical context.
* Consumers can explain their behavior. The Harvard professor says that after the fact attempt attempts to make sense of their behavior, but rarely explain its controlling factors.
* Consumers' mind, brain, body and culture can be studied independently. The best information, he says, from studying their interaction.
* Memories accurately represent their actions. He notes their memories change with time.
* Buyers think in words. Not true, says the professor. Their words expressed in surveys and focus groups come only after they consciously opt to express their unconscious thoughts.
* Consumers interpret marketing messages the ways marketers intend them. Since consumers do not think in words, a clever message does not guarantee a message will be absorbed.

Time spent reading this book will challenge marketing experts to deliver messages that are relevant to consumers' experience and context, rather than bombarding them with their own perceptions.


Insights into the Mind of the Market   June 30, 2003
Craig L. Howe (Darien, CT United States)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful

Every marketing manager wants to understand the consumer's thought process. Yet few succeed.

That is Gerald Zaltman, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School and a fellow at Harvard University's interdisciplinary Mind, Brian Behavior Initiative, message in this fascinating book. Marketers would like to think they control the image of their brands, but in reality it is brain and the mind of the consumer that controls an individual's brand perception.

To be effective, the author says, new marketing strategies will have to add neurology, musicology, philosophy and zoology to anthropology, psychology and sociology they currently use.

Many marketing managers handicap themselves by clinging to the following ideas:
* Consumers think in a rational way. In reality, Zaltman says, the selection process is affected by emotion, the subconscious and physical context.
* Consumers can explain their behavior. The Harvard professor says that after the fact attempt attempts to make sense of their behavior, but rarely explain its controlling factors.
* Consumers' mind, brain, body and culture can be studied independently. The best information, he says, from studying their interaction.
* Memories accurately represent their actions. He notes their memories change with time.
* Buyers think in words. Not true, says the professor. Their words expressed in surveys and focus groups come only after they consciously opt to express their unconscious thoughts.
* Consumers interpret marketing messages the ways marketers intend them. Since consumers do not think in words, a clever message does not guarantee a message will be absorbed.

Time spent reading this book will challenge marketing experts to deliver messages that are relevant to consumers' experience and context, rather than bombarding them with their own perceptions.