ZMET Thoughts & Takeaways

One of the biggest challenges in today's marketing world is to not just discover what people are thinking, but to discover why and how they are thinking. 

And out of the demand for more deep qualitative research, the ZMET was born.  Oh, the ZMET...A lot of surprises in that one.

For those who don't know, the "Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique" (or ZMET) is brilliant method for getting inside our minds. It is a technique developed by Dr. Gerald Zaltman in the early 1990's, and the idea is to deepen our understanding of the subconscious thoughts we have towards a product, a brand, or an experience.  It's a handy tool to examine things like why do we like a certain brand over another, why one product speaks to us, and so on.  
The basic process goes like this: you select a number of images that remind you of whatever the topic is - the more randomly you come across the images the better.  Then, you are interviewed and asked to go in greater depth into the images.  The common threads between the different images you can find is quite astounding.  
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Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the whole experience for my (and bringing it back to marketing) was a new-found appreciation of how much thought smart advertisers put into their ads, and just how powerful a good ad can be.  Going through a ZMET reminded me of how difficult qualitative research is...especially since we are each complex individual human beings.