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A nontraditional, multidisciplinary technique lets marketing researchers analyze what customers want.
Many of today's marketing research techniques, such as surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups, rely on verbal found in a message is nonverbal. Another contention offered by researcher Ray Birdwhistell (1970) is that words comprise no more than 30% of the meaning in a social exchange. Cognitive scientists acknowledge that human beings think in images, not in words. Sociolinguists also recognize that most communication is nonverbal. The implication of these findings for the marketing research field is that a disjunction exists between how consumers think and communicate and the marketing methods used to elicit and explicate this information. Customers are better able to convey their thoughts in nonverbal terms, and in turn we can learn more from them. Therefore, combining nonverbal images with verbal communication creates a more meaningful message than relying on verbal communication alone.
In a 1995 Journal of Advertising ResearcH article, "Seeing the Voice of the Customer: Metaphor-Based Advertising Research," Gerald Zaltman, professor of business administration at Harvard University and a fellow with Harvard University's interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, and his colleague, Robin Higie Coulter, associate professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut, outlined five ways or areas in which marketing research needs to be improved. They are:
1. It should provide a deeper understanding about consumers as a basis for advertising and other marketing-mix decisions.
2. It should do a better job of eliciting customers' latent and emerging needs.
3. It should provide better guidance to marketing researchers in capturing consumers' attention and further engaging their thought processes.
4. It should help codify and organize nonverbal data better.
5. It should facilitate the presentation of researchers' findings in ways that more closely resemble the end products their clients must develop, e.g., visual advertising.
Indeed, a need exists for a more precise research tool to address the deficiencies in current marketing research methods. The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) was developed for this purpose.
ZMET
U.S. Patent No. 5,436,830, "a technique for eliciting interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior," is Zaltman's brainchild. His work focuses on the question of how to represent human thought. Zaltman describes ZMET as "a patented research tool which allows people to...