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How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
80% of new products underperform or fold in the six months following their launch. Find out how to plumb the depths of consumers' unconscious minds and mean more to your target market.

Baby boomers are big spenders, unlike their World War II generation parents whose early experiences of hardship influenced lifelong habits of conscientious economizing. Collectively, the baby boomers are a powerful economic force – not only because of their great numbers, but also because they tend to be open to new things and determined to live for the moment. As they reach the height of their earning power and watch their children move out, they are becoming more than ever before the ideal target market for businesses and advertisers. But the average baby boomer is also a sophisticated consumer with clear preferences and demands. This means companies have more reason than ever to want a firm understanding of their target markets and how consumers think.

Professor Gerald Zaltman of the Harvard
Business
School

contends that marketers are a long way from achieving this understanding. Citing the fact that four out of five new products fail, or fall well short of their projected profits, in the first six months, he charges that the problem is "a great mismatch (that) exists between the way consumers experience and think about their world and the methods marketers use to collect this information." Zaltman suggests other methods, including clever questioning that taps consumers' subconscious drivers. With dazzling skill he interweaves research and analysis to produce some truly original ideas about the processes behind buying decisions – contextualizing customer thought, for example, in terms of memory, stories and metaphors.

The many data-gathering suggestions proffered are doable; Zaltman walks readers through his method of identifying shared values in a target market through innovative interviews with small customer cross-sections. Theoretically dense material is leavened with easy directions for increasing responsiveness in target markets. Positing that 95% of thinking occurs in the unconscious mind, he keeps his focus steadily on the task of accessing that part of the brain. There is advice on evoking meaning through appropriate metaphors and images, measuring consumers' unconscious reactions to marketing stimuli, and developing universal "consensus maps" for target markets and segments.

Zaltman's is a compelling book that strives to go beyond the obvious and discern more subtle reasons why so much marketing misses the mark. No market researcher or strategist can afford to his insights into the well-hidden source of new-product woes: the consumer's unconscious mind.

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