|
How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (精装)
by Jerry Zaltman
| Category:
Marketing, Customer research, Marketing research |
| Market price: ¥ 358.00
MSL price:
¥ 338.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An unusual marketing book with profound insight into the role of subconscious in the consumer’s mind and how we can then take advantage of this discovery when we make decisions. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
|
| |
AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
|
|
Fast Company (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
How Customers Think is exciting… It advances provacative ideas ... for real learning and change. |
|
|
Harvey Schachter (Globe and Mail) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
It’s a handy and thought-provoking, if not essential, book for modern marketers. |
|
|
brandchannel.com (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
Anyone involved in market research should read this book: it’s where the practice is headed. |
|
|
Bill Clem, Business 2.0 Magazine (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
The book is informative and verbalizes part of my own philosophy, developed after 25 years in the product development field. |
|
|
Marketing Management (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
The book describes some important, recent knowledge about how customers think, feel, remember, and construct their realities. |
|
|
Sean Gallagher (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
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.
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 it was a best selling mystery novel. (Use of metaphors intentional!) |
|
|
David Wolfe (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
Consumer research is a $6 billion business. But the ROI on research expenditures is being questioned as never before. This is ironic given that advances in information technology have vastly expanded analytic capabilities and increased customer data by an order of magnitude.
Jerry Zaltman’s How Customers Think 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 consumers’ 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 consumers’ minds (right brain as it was) with the perceiving, thinking (left brain) dimension of their minds to yield a holistic picture of customers’ 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 consumers’ 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 Zaltman’s book in hand, one needs not go back to school for a degree in psychology to gain a practical understanding of how customers’ 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. Zaltman’s 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. |
|
|
Blaine Greenfield (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
In this book, Zaltman presented six common marketing fallacies:
- 1. Consumers think in well-reasoned, linear ways as they evaluate products. They don't. For example, consumers do not consciously assess a car's benefits attribute by attribute and decide whether to buy it. Instead, their emotions - the desire for happiness, prestige, and so on - play a bigger role than logic in the purchase decision.
- 2. Consumers can plausibly explain their thinking and behavior. In reality, however, 95 percent of thinking takes place in our subconscious minds. People use conscious thought primarily as a way to rationalize behavior.
- 3. Consumers' minds, brains, bodies, and surrounding culture can be studied independently of one another. In fact, the mind, brain and external world interact with, and help shape, one another. For example, people from different cultures experience physical pain differently.
- 4. Consumers' memories accurately reflect their experience. Research reveals that memory is not perfect, and in fact it changes depending on the situation. For example, when people are asked to recall an experience, their memories are influenced by the sequence in which the questions are asked, and even the color of the paper on which the survey is printed.
- 5. Consumers think primarily in words. Yet brain scans suggest that only a small portion of the brain's neural activity ultimately surfaces in language.
- 6. Consumers can received "injections" of company messages - and interpret them correctly. However, consumers do not passively absorb messages. They constantly reinterpret such messages in terms of the unique experiences. For instances, people have long heard that they should visit the dentist every six months. But research shows that most individuals are very skeptical about the need for such dental visits.
|
|
|
Robert Morris (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
In recent months, I have read a number of excellent books on the general subject of marketing or on the more specific subject of branding/brand management. I think each of them would be invaluable, not only to those entrusted with marketing responsibilities but to all other decision-makers within any organization, regardless of size of nature. For example, Jeff Fox's How to Become a Marketing Superstar and Seth Godin's Purple Cow.
This book is certainly outstanding but I recommend it only to those who are (a) corporate marketing managers, (b) principals, account supervisors, and account managers in advertising agencies, and (c) students enrolled in MBA programs, preferably if read in combination with Joseph Murphy's The Powers of Your Subconscious Mind. Zaltman makes significant demands on his reader as he explores with meticulous care how all people (not only customers) function both on the conscious and subconscious level. He identifies and applies a number of key terms such as cognitive unconscious, metaphor elicitation, response latency, and neuroimagining. He explains the Metaphor-Elicitation process, how to use a Consensus Map, and memory's "fragile power." For me, some of the most interesting and most valuable material is provided in Chapter Nine ("Memory, Metaphor, and Stories") and Chapter Ten ("Stories and Brands"), in part because I am especially interested in organizational symbols, rituals, and traditions. Zaltman shifts his and his reader's attention to "Crowbars for Creative Thinking" (a terrific chapter title) following by the final two chapters in which he (somehow) reviews and then integrates all of his key concepts while explaining how and why "Quality Questions Beget Quality Answers" and how to launch a "New Mind-Set."
I hope you have noted my frequent use of "how to" while briefly reviewing the range of subjects embraced by Zaltman's own intellect as he takes a "frank" look at the state of marketing today, introduces and analyses a "new paradigm" through examples of "how companies today apply the paradigm's principles, with remarkable results," and (in Part III) expands the perspective beyond customers' and consumers' thinking. Specifically, Zaltman shows managers ten ways to "break out of the box" when thinking about consumers and marketing - and how they can help their colleagues to do the same. In Chapter 12, he suggests that new ways of thinking begin with better ways of asking questions and offers eight guidelines. Then in Chapter 13, Zaltman offers a word of caution about regressing into "business as usual" attitudes and practices, to what Jim O'Toole has characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Zaltman views his book as a "starting point" for better representing (and understanding) the "mind of the market," which is to say both the conscious and subconscious mind of the given customer or consumer.
Zaltman's reference to a "starting point" can be interpreted in quite different ways. Some may conclude that he is suggesting that his book offers an appropriate "starting point" for those in need of books about marketing. In m y opinion, that is not his intention. (My own recommendations would be Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination, Ries and Trout's Positioning, and Harvard Business Review on Marketing. After a careful reading of those two volumes, Zaltman's book will be much more accessible.) Rather, I think Zaltman's use of the term "starting point" has quite a different purpose: To suggest (and I agree) that mankind's efforts to understand what the mind is, how it works, etc. have only just begun...especially with regard to efforts to understand how and why customers think. Our "voyage from the familiar" has only begun.
This is one of several books I felt obliged to re-read at least once before attempting to formulate a review of it. (Others include Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire and Pinker's How the Mind Works.) I'll take this opportunity to thank Gerald Zaltman for a uniquely thought-provoking as well as informative intellectual experience. How well I apply what I think I have learned from him has yet to be determined. Frankly, my own journey of discovery is only at its "starting point." |
|
|
Kathryn Braun (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-01 00:00>
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!
|
|
|
|
1 2 | Total 2 pages 12 items |
|
|
|
|
|
|
