Synopses & Reviews
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, questionaires, 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 perecent 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 demonstrates 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.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 291-310) and index.
Synopsis
How to unlock the hidden 95 per cent of the customer's mind that traditional marketing methods have never reached. This title provides practical synthesis of the cognitive sciences. Drawing heavily on psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and linguistics, Zaltman combines academic rigor with real-world results to offer highly accessible insights, based on his years of research and consulting work with large clients like Coca-Cola and Procter and Gamble. An all-new tool kit: Zaltman provides research tools - metaphor elicitation, response latency, and implicit association techniques, to name a few - that will be all-new to marketers and demonstrates how innovators can use these tools to get clues from the subconscious when developing new products and finding new solutions, long before competitors do.
Table of Contents
Part I : Preparing for an expedition -- A voyage from the familiar -- A voyage to new frontiers -- Part II : Understanding the mind of the market -- Illuminating the mind : consumers' cognitive unconscious -- Interviewing the mind/brain : Metaphor elicitation : appendix -- Interviewing the mind/brain : Response latency and neuroimaging -- Come to think of it -- Reading the mind of the market : using consensus maps -- Memory's fragile power -- Memory, metaphor, and stories -- Stories and brands -- Part III : Thinking differently and deeply -- Crowbars for creative thinking -- Quality questions beget quality answers -- Launching a new mind-set.