Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Metaphor marketing and the arts
I just stumbled onto an older article in Fast Company on professor Jerry Zaltman, a marketing and consumer behavior maven at Harvard. He's been working on ways to discover the hidden metaphors behind the way consumers view their world. His assumption is that we can't just ask people what they want, because they honestly don't know. From the article:
The problem, Zaltman says, is that our knowledge of what we need lies so deeply embedded in our brains that it rarely surfaces. Our native tongue is powerless to call it out of hiding; a second, more obscure language is needed. But few who speak to us in the marketplace even know that this second language exists -- let alone how to speak it.'A lot goes on in our minds that we're not aware of,' says Zaltman. 'Most of what influences what we say and do occurs below the level of awareness. That's why we need new techniques: to get at hidden knowledge -- to get at what people don't know they know.'
Zaltman's response is the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET). The process involves individuals finding images from magazines, family photos, catalogs, and other sources to make a concept collage...an abstract image that represents how they feel about a certain product or service. Then, through a facilitated and focused interview process, each participant talks through the image and why they chose the pictures they did.
In other words, they explore feelings and emotions through creative expression. Hmmmm.
The ZMET process has been applied to all sorts of everyday consumer goods: from pantyhose to chocolate bars. One fascinating result came in the study of the Nestle Crunch bar:
'The Nestle Crunch bar turns out to be a very powerful icon of time,' Zaltman says. 'The company had never noticed that before.' Subjects brought in pictures of old pickup trucks, of children playing on picket-fenced suburban lawns, of grandfather clocks, of snowmen, and of American flags. The candy bar evoked powerful memories of childhood, of simpler times. It was less a workday pick-me-up than a time machine back to childhood.
Back in 1998, the Heinz Endowments and the Pew Charitable Trusts supported a study by Zaltman of public perceptions of the arts (I wish there were a link to it, but there's not...I've got a copy on my bookshelf). The study found that participation in the arts carried a full range of metaphorical connections for individuals. They grouped these connections into four themes that any marketing director should take to heart in all that they do:
The Arts as Transporter
Participants in the study viewed the arts as a way of acutely experiencing time and space -- as the report puts it, 'living in the moment and stepping away from daily reality.'The Arts as Redeemer
Participants in the study described the arts as providing a means of recapturing -- however temporarily -- a lost or unrealized potential, such as to be a singer, an artist or an actor. 'The arts are, in large part, about retrieving lost, buried, untapped desires and impulses and indulging them in safe, bounded places for temporary amounts of time.'The Arts as Appropriator
Through this theme, participants described the ability of the arts to strip away layers of socialization and thus to carry them back to a more 'pure' and 'innocent' stage of development, namely childhood, when it was easier to shift from reality to fantasy. 'Ironically,' the report finds, 'while the arts seem to speak to the child within, they also help [participants] evolve themselves toward some higher state of being: becoming more mature, more confident.'The Arts as Intermediary
Participants in the study viewed the arts as aggrandizing them by giving them the ability to see the world and themselves somewhat differently -- they valued its power as a lens to give them a new perspective. They also appreciated how the arts 'humanize and personalize the complexities of the world by putting a face on abstract issues.'
Zaltman has a book out on his work (not on the arts, but on consumers), if you're interested in learning more.
posted on Wednesday, April 14, 2004 | permalink
