Mysteries of the Mind
Your unconscious is making your everyday decisions
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.
And Zaltman has found that even grand metaphors have their practical applications. The architectural firm Astorino and the design firm Fathom asked Zaltman for help in designing a new children's hospital that would make a difficult experience somehow easier for children, their parents, and the people who work there. With the classic ZMET technique, children, parents, and staff members cut out pictures they somehow associated with the hospital and were then interviewed for nearly two hours about these pictures, exploring the thoughts, feelings, and associations that they triggered. A stream of metaphors emerged in the conversation. A child brought in a picture of a mournful-looking pug, which she colored blue "because he's kind of sad, and that's the way I feel when I'm in the ICU or just can't get out of my room."
After each picture was thoroughly analyzed by the participants, the images were scanned, and another interviewer with a computer and a talent for the Photoshop program sat with the parent, child, or staff member and created a collage, a personal Rorschach test of the images (box, Page 60). This snapshot of the participant's unconscious associations with the hospital was then enlarged to include personal narratives using the collage. The process is painstaking, but after the transcripts of these sessions are reviewed, even in all the enormous variety of human expression and emotion, core themes emerge. In the case of Children's Hospital, says Christine Astorino Del Sole of the Fathom firm, "the main metaphor was transformation, and the supporting metaphors were control, connection, and energy."
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