Metaphor Marketing

But as Zaltman probed more deeply, he unearthed a surprise. "The Nestle Crunch bar turns out to be a very powerful icon of time," Zaltman says. "The company had never noticed that before." Subjects brought in pictures of old pickup trucks, of children playing on picket-fenced suburban lawns, of grandfather clocks, of snowmen, and of American flags. The candy bar evoked powerful memories of childhood, of simpler times. It was less a workday pick-me-up than a time machine back to childhood. At the very least, Zaltman says, Nestle found out that "a cue about time could be especially engaging - whether it's an hourglass or a clock or a sepia drawing on the wall. It can be a very small item, but you know that the eye is going to be directed toward it."

While Nestle learned something new about a product that was old, Motorola learned something unexpected about a product not yet born. Late last year, the company was studying how to market a new security system. Hoping to understand the metaphorical side of the product, a few managers used ZMET to ask, How do potential customers feel when they're secure and when they're insecure? Then, same drill as always: pictures, interviews, artwork.

"I was struck by how very profound and fascinating the pictures were," says Wini Schaeffer, a Motorola manager involved in the project. What images did subjects select? Dogs. Lots of them. Interviewees revealed that canines represented comfort and security: the feeling of protection that comes from knowing that a loyal animal is looking out for them. This finding could have enormous implications for how the product is positioned - less as a technological gizmo, more as a companion - and for how it is named: Don't call it "The Talkatron." Call it, say, "The Watchdog."

"I can't imagine that a survey would uncover that," says Schaeffer. "In this method, there are aha's. You get answers to questions that you never thought to ask."

Thinking Across Boundaries

In the land of the metaphor, Jerry Zaltman is an evangelist, loping across the country to spread the ZMET gospel. In recent months, he's traveled to Atlanta to advise Coca-Cola and to Cincinnati to consult with Proctor & Gamble. But the mother church is on the Harvard Business School campus, in a suite that resembles a doctor's office: a place called the "Seeing the Voice of the Customer Lab."

After luring Zaltman away from the University of Pittsburgh in 1991, Harvard agreed to help finance this site and to fill it with a small staff. One of Zaltman's most seasoned interviewers is consultant Randi Cohen, a lean and stylish 30-year-old Stanford PhD, who also teaches marketing at Boston University. For what she calls her "guided conversations," she stations herself in a windowless room not much different from the kind that police use to interrogate suspects. In one of the lab's other two rooms sits Marion Finkle, a 31-year-old graphic artist who helps subjects use the bleeding-edge software necessary to create beguiling digital images. And in the third room is Trevor Messersmith, a hip twentysomething who, like Finkle, designs the multimedia presentations that the lab delivers to clients at the end of a project. In this setting, the Z-Team members more resemble the staff of a Silicon Alley startup than the employees of North America's most venerable university.

But Zaltman isn't your typical business-school professor: He resists absolute pronouncements - often responding to a question with another question, or by admitting that he doesn't know the answer. Asked why he moved to Pittsburgh from a tenured position on the renowned marketing faculty at Northwestern University's Kellogg School, he says, "To tell you the truth, I don't have a good answer." Asked why he accepted Harvard's invitation to leave Pitt, he says, "Sometimes we do things for more complicated reasons than we'll allow ourselves to see."

And like the plastic models in his office, Zaltman's brain is all over the place. He studies neuroscience, art, semiotics, computers, and, yes, even business. At Pitt, he held positions in the School of Public Health, the Department of Sociology, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and the Business School. At Harvard, he's a fellow at the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative, one of the nation's most ambitious interdisciplinary undergraduate majors.

This ability to think across disciplines is the secret of ZMET, Zaltman says. And it's a skill that's becoming critical in the new world of business: "I don't buy the notion that the world is organized the way universities and companies are. Ideas don't know what discipline they're in," he explains. "We might kidnap them and say, 'That's a marketing idea' or 'That's an anthropology idea.' But if you walked up to an idea on the street, it wouldn't know about that."

Nepal Meets Magritte