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How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market | 
 enlarge | Author: Gerald Zaltman
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Category: Book
List Price: $32.95
Buy New: $8.99
You Save: $23.96 (73%)
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Rating:  46 reviews
Sales Rank: 21322
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 1578518261
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.8342
EAN: 9781578518265
ASIN: 1578518261
Publication Date: February 21, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 41 more reviews...
Essential Tools for Positioning & Customer Experience Improvement August 25, 2008
Lynn Hunsaker (San Jose, CA)
If a picture tells 1,000 words, and the average person uses 5-6 metaphors per minute, then typical market research is just hitting the tip of the iceberg in accessing the 5,000+ wpm that customers process internally. Zaltman shows how to tap into the subconscious and nonverbal elements by using metaphor-based research methods. The 1st part of the book contains a lot of neat facts although it is written in a rather academic style, but the middle section gives how-to and examples of metaphor-based research. Overall I found the book to be eye-opening, thorough, and useful ... in fact, essential for superior brand/product positioning and customer experience improvement.
 Talks a lot about insight but doesn't deliver much. July 14, 2008
Byron Sharp (Adelaide, Australia)
Disappointing. If you have read some bestsellers touching on with recent findings in neuroscience (e.g. Antonio Damasio) and memory (e.g. Daniel Schacter) then what's left of this book for you is largely an advertisement for Zaltman's commercial and patented (!!) market research technique called 'Zaltman's metaphor elicitation'.
Yes there are good reasons to doubt focus groups (more reasons than Zaltman discusses), as well as management intuition, and market research that asks consumers why they bought what they bought. But that doesn't mean we need to resort to Zaltman's consultancy which bears a strong resemblance to some of the excesses of 1960s motivational research. Anyway Zaltman makes a very poor case for this logical leap, he really presents it as a fait accompli (I believe so so should you).
For marketing managers the greatest weakness of this book is the lack of integration with known facts of buying behaviour. The discoveries of even 20th Century marketing science are ignored. So there are no facts in this book about how consumers actually buy, or consume media. And so such facts aren't used as a check against Gerry's ideas. Indeed there is no testing of any ideas.
The marketing examples are purely anecdotal, and often very vague - suggesting a lack of first-hand knowledge (they read as if they were mentioned by 3rd parties to the author at the end of a seminar or over a chat). I can't recall anything convincing about sales results, or anything public that could be externally validated, the anecdotes have to be taken on trust. Even so, surprisingly, they tend to make very weak vague claims:
e.g. "managers at Coca-Cola's German office found that new research on memory contradicted many of their prevailing assumptions about how memory worked and how to design effective advertising campaigns. By applying several key findings about memory.. [they] launched a successful marketing program in that country." You don't say, wow ! What assumptions, what research, what sort of advertising program ? All we readers get is:
"Specifically, the company created more meaning (sic) and effective advertising by understanding the reconstructive nature of memory and the various factors affecting the encoding and retrieval of memory".
It would perhaps be acceptable if that sort of anecdote came at the start of the book - you'd expect more exciting, harder, detailed evidence to come later once the reader was familiar with the book's key concepts. But this example comes from page 258 - this sort of feeble anecdote is about as good as it gets as far as evidence that this book has any real-world application value.
As other reviewers have noted it's also an overly long rather abstract book, with somewhat indulgent structure, for example the third part is about management thinking not "how customers think". This book talks a lot about insight but doesn't deliver much.
 Warmed over goulash of random marketing findings March 25, 2008
M. Mullany (San Francisco, CA United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is a disjointed, rambling and under-edited compendium of topics from market research. The author swings from brand development to product development to service experience as if they were fundamentally about the same thing. The number of U.S. automotive examples in the book is truly dispiriting since last time I checked, the market share loss was continuing unabated in spite of all of these allegedly successful studies. His section on focus group usefulness is far too negative. There are far better topic specific books on the market about brand, product development and service experience development. Buy those.
 Marketing and Psychology cross January 14, 2008
Jim Estill
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a great cross between a psychology book and a marketing book.
I was interested in this book because it talks a lot about understanding how and why customers buy. Clearly no business is successful without customers.
One challenge my company, SYNNEX, has is addressing needs of many different customers, many of which have different needs. What might be seen as essential for one customer is not even valued by another. I believe all companies are best for specific types of customer and the more within the target range a customer fits, the happier they are. And the opposite is true. Where I see dissatisfied customers, they normally do not fit the specific ideal customer type. We cannot be everything to everybody.
He uses many examples of optical illusion and how perception in some cases is more important than reality in the mind of the customer.
Marketing can alter perception. And measuring perception can be very difficult.
Worst book Ever August 10, 2007
Faisal Sarraj
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I dont know if this is a marketing book!!
Too much text for less benefits
Ideas are not integrated with each other specially when connecting science with Marketing
Not too many marketing examples.
Even the examples did not show what where the exact results of the specified theories conducted
At the end of the book he fills it with text about creativity, oh please!!! this is supposed to be a book about marketing and how I am supposed understand customers not how to be creative
One more thing, he argues that products are how they are perceived in the mind of the customer and not what the products are in reality. Well, this is a very old idea, maybe the writer should read books for Al Ries and Jack Trout about Positioning.
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