Are You Mistaking Facts for Insights? Lighting up Advertising’s Dark Continent of Imagination
Gerald Zaltman
Harvard Business School
Editor’s Note:A major theme underlying Zaltman’s research is how managers and customers represent and apply their ideas and knowledge. In addition to two other patents involving neuroscience and marketing, his Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is a method used to probe how unconscious thinking drives behavior. ZMET (the first patented market research tool in the United States) draws on art theory, linguistics, neurobiology, psychology and semiotics to reveal how people conceptualize any given topic. It has been applied to managers...