How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
by Gerald Zaltman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gerald ZaltmanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-02-21
ISBN: 1578518261
Number of pages: 323
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Book Reviews of How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
Book Review: Brilliant insight. Required reading for all marketers!
Summary: 5 Stars
REVIEW SUMMARY: "How Customers Think" will help you peer into the mind of your market in a way you never thought possible. It is new, fundamental, and essential for any marketer who wants to succeed. . In very understandable language the author explains how buying decisions are influenced by the complex interactions between mind, brain, body, and society. We also learn how the minds of marketers can distort their perceptions of customer's responses. Zaltman introduces the technique of metaphor elicitation to uncover and truly understand consumer wants and needs. This technique encourages consumers to use metaphors in talking about companies, brands, products, needs, etc. The author reports that by one estimate, we employ nearly six metaphors per minute of spoken language. Why? Because they facilitate the making of connections, helping humans understand the world that surrounds us. Metaphors, as defined by the author, are essential for understanding and communicating with the market (and all human interatcions for that matter). The book is important, interesting, applicable, and a pleasure to read
FULL REVIEW: It is a fantasy that many of us have experienced at some time in either our personal or professional lives: being able to peer inside someone else's mind to learn what exactly that person is thinking. The ability to understand another person's thinking, and the reasons for the thought process, has an enormous potential to reduce the friction inherent in human interactions. Imagine how it would reduce communications friction between you and your significant other if you could know exactly what your partner wants, and exactly why he/she wants it. With this information we could tailor our communications and interactions so that both parties get what they want and both are satisfied with the process.
Marketing, in essence, is about understanding the needs of a group of people called a market, creating a valuable solution to address the market's needs, communicating the differentiate value you have created, and pricing it in such a way as to induce a transaction where both parties are satisfied.
Zaltman helps us peer into the mind of the market in this very significant book, "How Customers Think." He tells us how people think from a neurological level. In very understandable language the author explains how a customer's buying decision is influenced by the complex interactions between mind, brain, body, and society. We also learn how the minds of marketers can distort their perceptions of customer's responses. It becomes clear that not only do we need to understand how customers think, but how we as marketers think.
In this book we learn some important facts about buyers and their thinking:
1. Consumers don't think in well-reasoned, linear ways.
2. Consumers cannot plausibly explain their thinking and behavior (because 95% of our thinking takes place in our unconscious).
3. Consumer's mind, brains, bodies, and culture can only be studied in relation to each other.
4. Consumer's memories may not accurately reflect their experience and those memories can change over time.
5. Consumers do not think primarily in words. The unconscious mind reveals itself as metaphors (similes, analogies, allegories, personifications, and proverbs).
6. Customers rarely can absorb a company message and interpret it correctly. They constantly reinterpret these messages in terms of their own unique experiences.
If consumers don't think in linear ways, 95% of their mental processing is unconscious, their memories are malleable, they don't think in words, and they reinterpret our marketing messages, how are we to understand them? Zaltman recommends the technique of metaphor elicitation to uncover and understand consumer wants and needs. This technique encourages consumers to use metaphors in talking about companies, brands, products, needs, etc.
A metaphor is a figurative language, referring to the representation of one thing in terms of another. The author reports that by one estimate, we employ nearly six metaphors per minute of spoken language. Why? Because they facilitate the making of connections, helping us understand the world that surrounds us.
Need an example of using a metaphor to communicate an abstract concept? Most people have never tasted frogs' legs, but they have an idea of what they taste like because they have been told they taste like chicken.
You will have to read the book to learn more about metaphor elicitation and how to use the data to more effectively market to your target segments. Or, to use a metaphor, Zaltman's book will be the key to unlocking the treasure chest of new information on communicating with your target market.
Of course, nothing is perfect and How Customers Think is no exception. The part on consensus maps could have been expanded while the section titled "The 10 Crowbars for Creative Thinking" could have been left out and covered in a separate article. And it's not a "how-to" book that will give you steps by step instructions for metaphor elicitation. Nor should it be, this book is an excellent introduction to an important and complex new marketing tool.
Bottom line: An excellent book with brilliant insight. It left me breathless as new and useful insights were revealed on almost every page. I was glued to the book as if it was a best selling mystery novel(Use of metaphors intentional!)
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Summary of How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
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 & 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.Management & Leadership Books
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