How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Hardcover)

by Gerald Zaltman (Author) "AFTER YEARS OF RESEARCH and development, a consumer-goods company launches a new soft drink-only to see it dry up in the marketplace..." (more)
Key Phrases: General Motors, Harvard University, Experience Engineering (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Harvard Business School professor Zaltman notes that despite enormous amounts of time and money dedicated to customer surveys and marketing, approximately 80% of all new products fail within six months or fall significantly short of their profit forecast. This shouldn't be surprising, he convincingly argues, since "a great mismatch exists between the way consumers experience and think about their world and the methods marketers use to collect this information." He calls for creative questioning that probes the unconscious values underlying consumers' reactions to products and marketing campaigns. Drawing on an impressive array of recent multidisciplinary research, Zaltman is especially provocative on the importance of memory, metaphor and storytelling in customers' decision making and the ways marketers might use these findings. Marketers worried about the scale and complexity of the surveys Zaltman advocates will breathe a sigh of relief as he outlines efficient methods to develop a set of shared values in a target market by creatively interviewing a small sample of customers. In fact, large vision and practical application go hand-in-hand for Zaltman. He may caution, rather abstractly, that successfully gauging the mind of the market depends on developing creative surveys and quality thinking about information gathered, but he also reminds readers to frame campaigns for a product in terms that vividly communicate its function and its emotional appeal for consumers. Zaltman's smart, practical analysis and many success stories will hold special appeal for those facing competitive markets, as well as for those rethinking more limited marketing approaches.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Any marketing professional will treasure this book." -- Denver Business Journal, December 8, 2003

"Anyone involved in market research should read this book: it’s where the practice is headed." -- brandchannel.com, August 6, 2003

"How Customers Think is exciting ... It advances provacative ideas ... for real learning and change." -- Fast Company Magazine, February 2003

"How Customers Think offers fresh insights into the consumer mind." -- Rajeev Kamineni, Marketing Update, October, 2003

"It’s a handy and thought-provoking, if not essential, book for modern marketers." -- Harvey Schachter, Globe and Mail, May 7, 2003

"The book describes some important, recent knowledge about how customers think, feel, remember, and construct their realities." -- Marketing Management, July 8, 2003

"The book is informative and verbalizes part of my own philosophy, developed after 25 years in the product development field." -- Bill Clem, Business 2.0 Magazine, May 1, 2003

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 323 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; 1 edition (February 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578518261
• ISBN-13: 978-1578518265
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #56,646 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Helpful Concepts Abstractly Portrayed, October 6, 2003

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Few would have any argument with the central thesis of this book. Most new products fail rapidly in unexpected ways, suggesting that a misunderstanding of what is required by customers is part of the problem. Professor Zaltman goes on to suggest that his patented approach to considering more aspects of customer thinking (especially emotion, associations and context) can help improve matters.

The book argues successfully that most marketing research methods are misused (usually by being applied to solve the wrong class of problem). He also does a fine job of explaining how marketers' attitudes and opinions create myopia that prevents them from learning what they need to know.

There is extensive material in the book about how the brain works in the context of purchasing decisions. For those who are familiar with brain research, there is little new here.

As someone who has worked in marketing research for over 30 years, I found the explanation of how to do better to be abstract and often counter to my own experience with extensive one-on-one open-ended interviews. Let me share a few examples. First, he states that consensus maps (a graphic expression of the universal considerations and order that consumers go through to make a purchasing decision) of how consumers think almost always emerge after 10 interviews . . . far short of statistical norms. That finding made me wonder if the maps are done too abstractly to capture the richness of customer thinking. Second, all of the examples of specific brands seemed to relate to an adult making a decision with the item in front of her or him. Yet, many consumers arrive at the grocery store (for example, since much of the book is about food products) with a shopping list in hand. Are consensus maps the same for self purchase as for purchase for others? The book doesn't seem to address that point. If the items are to be purchased for another family member, how do the different consensus maps overlap and affect one another? Third, the book doesn't do much to address how misimplementation of new products and marketing strategies causes failure. In my experience, that problem is greater than a lack of understanding of how customers think. Fourth, the incentives in most marketing organizations favor using marketing research to locate reasons to justify a marketer's decisions. Professor Zaltman acknowledges this, but doesn't really address how to institutionally change the culture. His suggestions presume that everyone is more interested in promoting company results than protecting individual careers while the opposite is often the case. Fifth, the real weakness in most organizations is that the head of marketing research has an insufficient background in the subject to make the right suggestions and to persuade management to follow those suggestions. That problem isn't addressed at all. Sixth, the best applications for this kind of research are for services . . . yet there were few examples of services compared to food items. In services, you have more things you can change and the potential for improvement is greater. The strength of the book mostly comes in the service examples (which are often overly disguised).

The book also has a tone that I did not like. It seems to suggest that no one had ever developed thinking process maps or used depth one-on-one interviews before this patented process was developed. Many aspects of the concepts described here were in broad scale application in companies that I have worked with over 30 years ago. Many of these companies belonged to the Marketing Science Institute, with which Harvard (where Professor Zaltman practices) has long had a close association. In addition, those who have employed these concepts are universally praised. That was strange, because many of them have pulled some of the biggest errors that violate these principles. For example, the research on new Coke was flawed by not telling consumers that the existing Coca-Cola would be removed from the market. Yet Coca-Cola is cited universally as an example of advanced marketing research.

The book also comes across as a sales pitch far too often. That is almost unprecedented in my experience in reading a book from a professor. The same marketing research organizations are used as examples over and over again. You are also told that one way to get these good results is to hire a "wizard," which is presumably one of these firms. Wouldn't it make more sense to develop a proprietary skill in this area so that competitors would have less chance to learn what you find out?

Finally, the reports of success seem unconvincing. They are based on self-reported satisfaction with short-term results. Now, if you've hired someone to help you and spent a lot of money to do so, even the most inexperienced market researcher knows that there will be a bias towards reporting positive results. Also, paid market researchers will share their "best" results, rather than their average or below average results. I was left wondering what the long term benefits are, and what the average expectation can be.

Despite these reservations, I think most marketing executives will benefit from the book's discussions of what types of marketing research to use for what types of issues. But the total of that information could have been captured in a magazine article.

Both marketing executives and researchers will benefit from chapter 12.

Those who purchase or use marketing research would do well to become familiar with this book.

I hope that Professor Zaltman will write another book in the future that will be more helpful to marketing research professionals. It has always been the case that 99% of the profession is engaged in doing repetitive tracking research. With few looking into creative research to better develop new products, improve brands and enhance the lives of customers, we need to develop a larger cadre of well-trained individuals interested in these challenges if we are to ultimately improve on the dismal record of failure in making improvements.

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At Last! A book that addresses the customer's whole mind, June 8, 2003

By	David B. Wolfe (Reston, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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 has vastly expanded analytic capabilities and increased customer data by an order of magnitude.

Jerry Zaltmans 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 were) 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 Zaltmans 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. Zaltmans 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.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A few gems hidden in a lot of muck, June 24, 2005

By	D. Braithwaite (Shanghai, China) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

For most of its pages, "How Customers Think" is a silly book which conceals shallow content with glib explanations, pseudo-scientific rationales, and marketing / management jargon. Since it assumes the basic principles of marketing research without explanation, it is not useful to a beginning research practitioner or buyer. However, an experienced practitioner will find some interesting ideas, provided (s)he is willing to spend some time cutting through fluff to get to the meat.

The book's greatest flaw is its author's misconception, common to many authors in marketing and related fields, that books about marketing should themselves be examples of marketing. Much of the book reads like advertising copy for the marketing research methods and management principles expounded by the author. This slick style tries, but fails, to conceal a serious lack of content.

Most of the book's content falls into one of three categories, all useless. The first category: explanations of traditional qualitative questioning techniques, such as projection using pictures or collages. These methodologies are rehashed without any really new content or in-depth explanation. The second category: discussion of recent findings from cognitive science, along with case studies showing how these findings lead to better MR methods. Unfortunately, the author's own understanding of cognitive science is too shallow, and the connection between cognitive science and his successful case studies so tenuous, that one suspects cognitive science is nothing more than window dressing intended to sell services to clients. The third category: principles for successful business management. The author essentially proposes creativity and flexible thinking as magic bullets for business success, with apparently little understanding of how useless is the *mere* recognition of these principles.

"How Customers Think"'s one saving grace is its fourth category of content: genuinely innovative data collection and analytical methods, primarily for qualitative research. Most of this content relates to so-called "metaphor elicitation", a proposed technique for teasing out the language (and thus the concepts) relating to some core idea; and "consensus mapping", a proposed technique for systematically recording the results of many respondents' metaphor elicitation in a way that reflects the cognitive structure of the core idea. While these techniques do not represent a huge breakthrough, they are useful nonetheless. It's unfortunate that they take up such a small part of the book.