好书推荐：

作者：Gerald Zaltman是哈佛商学院教授，是ZMET方法的创始者。

一些重要的概念有：“Interviewing the Mind/Brain”，“Metophor eliciting”。创新的理念在于用户研究中，我们要做的不是去听用户怎么说，因为用户能说的都是表层的，对预测他们的行为只有大概5%的作用；而大部分都是用户自己不能表达的潜意识的东西，而这些潜意识决定着用户行为的95%。对用户研究人员来说，最重要的是如何通过各种技术了解用户自己不可及的，不能清楚表达的潜意识。了解了这些潜意识，将对我们预测用户的行为具有非常重要的作用。

想要在用户研究和市场研究领域有所创新的从业者必读的一本书。你可以通过Google book预览大部分内容：去看看。

A more detailed reviw from David B. Wolfe.

Consumer research is a $6 billion business. But the ROI on research expenditures is being questioned as never before. This is ironic given that advances in information technology has vastly expanded analytic capabilities and increased customer data by an order of magnitude.

Jerry Zaltman’s “How Customers Think” offers fresh insights into why companies are increasingly frustrated by consumer research. Drawing on contemporary brain research, he exposes fatal flaws in the hallowed premise in traditional consumer research that asking customers about their motivations is the best way to get clues about their future behavior.
Zaltman points out that surveys, questionnaires and focus groups fail to get behind the curtains of consciousness. This can prove fatal for a marketing program because at least 90% of mental activity that leads to perceptions, thinking and decisions takes place outside the conscious mind.
However, traditional research and marketing largely ignores the contents of the unconscious mind.

Why is this so, when contemporary brain research has learned that this is where motivations as well as perceptions and decisions originate? Because lacking an understanding of how minds work, researchers and marketers must depend by default on consumers’s conscious rational responses. However, disconnects between what consumers consciously think and what they feel at deeper levels often lead to marketplace failure.

Zaltman reconnects the emotional, feeling dimension of consumers’ minds (right brain as it were) with the perceiving, thinking (left brain) dimension of their minds to yield a holistic picture of customers’ minds.

Marketing often fails expectations because undue attention is given the contents of the rational left brain that respondents disgorge in traditional consumer research. Zaltman observes that researchers and marketers widely ignore the deep shadowy realm of motivating emotions because it is easier to record, process and analyze what consumers say directly about their needs and motivations.

Zaltman observes that recent brain research shows that emotional arousal is essential to the generation of sustained interest in a matter. Brain patients whose emotional capabilities have been destroyed while still having normal reasoning powers cannot determine whether one brand or another is best for them. Brand loyalty, it seems, is determined more by emotional responses than by rational analysis.

Zaltman shows how to get better guidance than direct questioning of them yields about what will stir consumers’ emotions. In doing this he addresses one of the most curious defects in traditional research and marketing: decisions are more often determined by the rules of statistical math than by tenets of behavior science. However, this should not be surprising because few marketers have grounding in how minds work. After all, a person can earn an MBA in marketing without a single course in behavior.

If the primary functional purpose of marketing is getting the attention of minds and influencing them to action, then it should follow that a deeper understanding of how minds work will make marketers more effective in doing that. However, with Zaltman’s book in hand, one needs not go back to school for a degree in psychology to gain a practical understanding of how customers’ minds work.

A word of caution, however: This book is to be studied, not scanned. It does not offer the simple, sound bite-sized solutions that are so commonplace in marketing books and that make them quickly forgettable. Zaltman’s book will not be forgettable to any person who makes a study of his book because he/she will experience a quantum leap in understanding how customers think.