But just try to answer these questions: What does your favorite brand mean to you? Why did you purchase the last gift you bought for someone else? Can you describe your ideal customer experience?
Questions like those make my head spin, because my behaviors, opinions, and decisions are driven as much by emotion as they are by logic.
Businesses that measure customer input solely via surveys and focus groups run the risk of deriving insights that miss the real drivers of customer behavior. My future actions with a company may be unintentionally different from what I can verbalize. When's the last time you bought a candy bar because "you needed a pick-me-up," when you really just had a craving for chocolate?
Fortunately, uncovering customer insights has evolved in amazing ways. Robert Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, has developed an innovative technique for unearthing the hidden drivers of customer behavior. The ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) asks customers to capture images that illustrate their thoughts, feelings, and opinions about a brand, product, or experience. Conversations with the customers then reveal what's behind those images, which lead to some really interesting insights.
Here's an example. A ZMET participant described the image that for her illustrated the brand of a large university in the Midwest the following way: "A red barn stands alone in the middle of a field. It's weathered, and the paint is chipping, but the foundation of the barn is structurally strong. The barn performs its duty without complaint, and the man who owns the barn takes great care of the functionality it provides. The barn also has a basketball hoop, but unlike the paint job, the hoop has a brand new net."
Those images drove a set of qualities— reliability, good work ethic, honesty, loyalty, strength, tradition, pride, and toughness—that helped define the brand experience for the university.
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