Work
After serving on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (1968–1975) and on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh (1975–1991),Zaltman was named the Joseph C. Wilson professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in 1991.
While at Harvard,Zaltman was awarded U.S. patent 5,436,830 for the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) in 1995,served as Director of the Seeing the Voice of the Customer Laboratory at Harvard Business School,and was co-director of the HBS Mind of the Market Laboratory.
In 1997,he and Jerry Olson from Penn State University's Smeal College of Business co-founded Olson Zaltman Associates,a market research and consulting firm that has worked with many Fortune 500 corporations including Procter &Gamble,Coca-Cola,Frito-Lay,Audi,Kraft,and Cisco.
Deep metaphors are unconscious "basic orienting structures of human thought" that affect how people process and react to information or a stimulus. They manifest themselves in surface metaphors used in everyday language and conversation;when grouped they constitute clues to what deep metaphor a person is using to frame or understand a topic (see Framing). Deep metaphors can be used in a marketing context to help marketers communicate more effectively to consumers about a brand,product,or topic with the same viewing lens,or deep metaphor,their consumers are already using. [2]
Cognitive linguists have written about the relationship between metaphor and its impact on the mind,specifically George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By [3] and Zoltan Kovecses in Metaphor:A Practical Introduction.. [4] In Zaltman's book,Marketing Metaphoria,he outlines what he calls the seven giants or the most basic and most recurring deep metaphors :journey,balance,container,connection,resource,control,and transformation. There are others such as force and paradox which are less common. [5]
Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique is the first patented market research tool in the United States. ZMET is a technique designed to elicit metaphors using a series of steps and non-directive probing. [6]
Origin and patent
ZMET was born during a trip Zaltman took to remote areas of Nepal in 1990. He gave locals,who had never taken photos before,cameras to take pictures of important things and events in their lives. For example,in some cases,the assignment was:What photos would you take if you wanted to show someone else what life was like here? Two weeks later he returned to the regions covered initially,gave copies to the photographers,and interviewed them about the meaning of their photos. Zaltman realized just how powerful the use of images “owned”by those being interviewed were in gaining a deep understanding of their implicit or tacit assumptions and beliefs. Zaltman noticed,for example,that they often cut off the feet of people appearing in their images. It was discovered that this was deliberate. The Nepalese did not want to embarrass their friends and neighbors by showing their bare feet,which was a sign of poverty,and for this reason deliberately chose to leave it out of the photographic record. [7]
Development
Zaltman began to wonder how this kind of insight could be used to gather consumer insights. In 1993,he formed the Seeing the Voice of the Customer Lab at Harvard Business School,and,in 1997,it was renamed the Mind of the Market Lab.
ZMET draws on a variety of disciplines including neurobiology,psychology,semiotics,linguistics,and art theory to elicit metaphors that can reveal how a person conceptualizes a given topic. Metaphors are a way of learning or understanding a new piece of information by comparing it to a known piece of information (see Conceptual metaphor). [8]
Applications
ZMET focuses on explaining the "why" behind the "what" of consumer behavior,allowing it to be used in a variety of applications from product development to communications evaluation. Increasingly,it is being used to address issues faced by non profit organizations and to address organizational matters. [9] : 140–141, 254
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Philip Kotler is an American marketing author, consultant, and professor emeritus; the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University (1962–2018). He is known for popularizing the definition of marketing mix. He is the author of over 80 books, including Marketing Management, Principles of Marketing, Kotler on Marketing, Marketing Insights from A to Z, Marketing 4.0, Marketing Places, Marketing of Nations, Chaotics, Market Your Way to Growth, Winning Global Markets, Strategic Marketing for Health Care Organizations, Social Marketing, Social Media Marketing, My Adventures in Marketing, Up and Out of Poverty, and Winning at Innovation. Kotler describes strategic marketing as serving as "the link between society's needs and its pattern of industrial response."
Ernest Dichter was an American psychologist and marketing expert known as the "father of motivational research." Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business — in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas.
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A target market, also known as serviceable obtainable market (SOM), is a group of customers within a business's serviceable available market at which a business aims its marketing efforts and resources. A target market is a subset of the total market for a product or service.
The Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET) is a market research tool. ZMET is a technique that elicits both conscious and especially unconscious thoughts by exploring people's non-literal or metaphoric expressions. It was developed by Gerald Zaltman at the Harvard Business School in the early 1990s. As Zaltman described it, "A lot goes on in our minds that we're not aware of. 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." The technique has been used by academic researchers and for marketing purposes to study a variety of topics related to both marketing and the social sciences.
Elicitation may refer to:
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Yoshinori Fujikawa is a Japanese academic and economist. He is an Associate Vice President at Hitotsubashi University, and serves as Associate Professor and MBA Program Director at Hitotsubashi University Business School, School of International Corporate Strategy.
Kathryn LaTour is an American academic, researcher and author. She is an applied cognitive psychologist and currently serves as the Banfi Vintners Professor of Wine Education and Management at the School of Hotel Administration within Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business.
