Personal Branding Blog – Dan Schawbel

Today, I spoke with Gerald Zaltman, who is a Harvard Business School professor and author. We go over the importance of marketing in our lives, why people fear change, how marketing should be universal (instead of being tied to a function of business), and talk about the significance of marketing research in learning more about customers. When it comes to personal branding, you want to know your audience, because it will help you communicate properly to them. Also, it pays to take a marketing class regardless of your major or position in your company.

Is there a “fear of change” in marketing? Why or why not?

In my experience managers will throw a lot of money at a problem before they become willing to change their thinking about it. There is a reluctance and even fear to change thinking and practice. Change may require acknowledging that one might have been wrong, always a difficult thing to do. Also, new ideas and practices often bring one into unfamiliar territory. This increases the perceived risk with new consequences associated with re-thinking. Unfortunately, many people work in organizations where risk taking is not encouraged. It may even be punished in subtle but painful ways.

Do you believe everyone should understand marketing, regardless of area of expertise and/or position?

“It is sometimes noted that marketing is too important to be left to the marketing function.”

There is a difference between “Big M” and “small m” marketing.

• “Small m“ marketing is what the marketing function does.
• “Big M“ marketing involves those many important decisions made throughout the firm that affects product and service development, delivery, and customer satisfaction.

It is critical that a firm be aware that decisions made throughout the organization ultimately impact its relationships with customers. That is one reason why customers insights need to be widely disseminated within an organization.

Marketing research is a very important topic. Learning more about your customers is essential to marketing to them. For the individual trying to build a brand, how is marketing research important to finding an audience and establishing “fans”?

Effective decision making, including identifying markets and building strong relationships with customers in those markets, requires having deep insights about customers. Having deep insights about customers or consumers depends on having deep insights from them. This, in turn, involves having in an depth understanding of how consumers think and what they think about. Providing this knowledge may be marketing research’s single most important role. It means going beyond surface level customer thinking and learning what it is customers don’t know they know.

How should we go about collecting marketing research? Can we use focus groups and survey’s or are there better ways?

All methods are compromises with reality. Less compromise is involved when multiple methods are used. When only one method can be used for, say, budgetary reasons, it is very important that the method chosen fits the nature of the problem. Too often managers and researchers tend to modify their definition of a problem to fit a familiar or easy to use method. This analogy may help. If you are sailing in unfamiliar waters it is essential to know wind direction. It may also be important to know wind velocity. Qualitative methods provide wind direction while quantitative methods provide velocity. Which do you most need to know? Methods that are appropriate for assessing velocity should not be used to assess direction and vice versa.

“95% or more of all cognition occurs below awareness methods that enable us to identify hidden emotions and thoughts are important.”

The lenghty and intensive ZMET interviews I tend to favor are one way of doing this. This provides valuable information about wind direction. Firms then often use our results to develop more quantitative approaches such as surveys when they find that they also need to learn about velocity. Unfortunately, focus groups, while sometimes helpful, cannot provide in depth insights relating to direction.

The most familiar limitations is that one person dominates the discussion thereby introducing bias. Even when there is more equitable distribution of conversation, the average “air time” per participant is about 10-12 minutes. This only allows for shallow. Those 10-12 minutes do not build depth now matter how many of these units you have. More importantly, one cannot build connections among ideas that are surfaced which can be considered representative of any one member of the group. For this reason they are not helpful in designing more quantitatively oriented follow up studies. explorations

What are your seven “giant” metaphors in people’s lives? Can you explain each one in a few sentences?

Rather than go into each one, let me address why they are important. Everyone sees their world through a lens. These lenses, much like emotions, operate automatically and unconsciously. They exert a powerful influence on what we hear, say, think and do. We call them “deep metaphors” since they constantly re-present experiences in our lives. Like emotions, there are a relatively small number of deep metaphors and they are the same around the globe. Of course, the particular personae of a given deep metaphor, like balance, takes on will vary from one culture to the next, from one person to the next, and even for the same person in different contexts or settings.

Sometimes what is relevant is emotional balance. In another setting it may be social balance or moral balance or physical balance and so on. But for any given consumption situation, we will typically see a particular deep metaphor operating even thought it may take different forms. For this reason it is essential to understand what deep metaphors your customers use when thinking about or using your product or service. It will be the single most important driver of their decisions and experiences. The seven “giants” we’ve identified in “Marketing Metaphoria” – balance, transformation, journey, control, container, resource, and connection – appear most often in studies we’ve conducted in more than 30 countries.

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Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School and a former member of the Executive Committee of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. He is a co-founder and senior partner in the research based consulting firm of Olson Zaltman Associates whose clients include some of the world’s most respected firms and brands.

His book, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (2003) has been translated into 15 languages. His newest book, co-authored with Lindsay Zaltman, is Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers (2008). This book addresses the deep metaphors or unconscious frames people use that influence their thinking and behavior.