Bloggence, Cunning, Exile

Cognitive Consumerism

excerpt from an article in U.S. News & World Report by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
Consuming thoughts.
Gerald Zaltman uses examples like these in many of his conversations. He may be an emeritus professor from the Harvard Business School, but he thinks about layers of consciousness like a neuroscientist. He is also a founding partner in Olson Zaltman Associates, a consulting firm that provides guidance to businesses seeking to better understand the minds--and in this case it is quite literally the minds--of consumers. As a professor of marketing, Zaltman obviously was very interested in figuring out what made people buy one thing and not the other. In the world of neuroscience, this goes to the heart of the profound questions of motivation. In the world of business, this goes to the bottom line.

When trying to probe the minds of consumers, Zaltman wondered if there was a way to move beyond the often-unreliable focus group to get at the true desires of consumers, unencumbered by other noise, which would finally result in more effective sales and marketing.

His solution became U.S. Patent No. 5,436,830, also known as the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, which is, according to the patent, "a technique for eliciting interconnected constructs that influence thought and behavior." From Hallmark cards to Broadway plays, from Nestle's Crunch bars to the design for the new Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, ZMET has been used to figure out how to craft a message so that consumers will respond with the important 95 percent of their brains that motivates many of their choices. How? Through accessing the deep metaphors that people, even without knowing it, associate with a particular product or feeling or place.

Language is limited, Zaltman says, "and it can't be confused with the thought itself." Images, however, move a bit closer to capturing fragments of the rich and contradictory areas of unconscious feelings. Participants in his studies cut out pictures that represent their thoughts and feelings about a particular subject, even if they can't explain why. He discovered that when people do this, they often discover "a core, a deep metaphor simultaneously embedded in a unique setting." They are drawn to seasonal or heroic myths, for example, or images like blood and fire and mother. They are also drawn into deep concepts like journey and transformation. His work around the world has convinced him that the menu of these unconscious metaphors is limited and universal, in the manner of human emotions like hope and grief. . . .

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Later in this article we find out how such "deep" findings are being applied to market Coke versus Pepsi. This is your university hard at work making the world safe for free trade. I suppose that the capitalists are planning for the day, soon enough, when they can go beyond merely colonizing your mind ideologically, psychologically, and socially. Next it will be cognitively. And soon after it will be genetically. This is your brain on capitalism.

posted by E. Heroux @ 5:45 PM