How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market

The author draws on an extensive body of multidisciplinary research, such as using consensus maps (useful diagrams), many examples of understanding the cognitive unconscious, metaphor elicitation examples and understanding the consumer’s memory process. This is an extensive study of research techniques and understanding the consumer mind.

The book is at times a disorganized or a rambling array of market research techniques and subjects. The author moves from brand development to product development and service experience with little structure or methodology for application.  It come across as overly academic at times, rather than a business or marketing book with clear methodology or structured applications. However, marketing executives or research types will find the wealth of techniques and examples compensate for these shortcomings.

How to unlock the hidden 95 percent 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.

This book offers many examples of tools which leading companies are using to help marketers “mine the unconscious.” Examples include developing research questions which speak to the unconscious brain, uncovering meaning through customer metaphors for use in brand communications or better measuring consumer reactions to marketing stimuli. The book will be of particular interest to marketing executives and market research professionals. For more on this subject, see the Senteo review for The Buying Brain.