Metaphor Marketing

The trail to ZMET begins in Nepal. In 1990, propelled by three divergent interests (photography, cognitive neuroscience, and Third World anthropology) Zaltman traveled to Nepal to photograph periodic markets, commercial conclaves that meet in rural areas every few months.

While he was there, Zaltman says, "I started thinking about the issue of bias. I can take all the pictures in the world, and they'll still be my photographs of someone else. The idea occurred to me: Maybe I should give film and cameras to people who had never looked through a lens before."

He contacted Eastman Kodak, which provided him with plastic cameras and 650 rolls of film. Accompanied by his wife and another couple, Zaltman returned to Nepal. "We'd visit a place, give people cameras, ask them to take pictures. We'd say, 'If you were to leave this village, what pictures would you take with you to show others what your life is like?'"

The villagers snapped their photos. Then the Zaltmans developed them and showed them to the "photographers." Then, Zaltman explains, "We had people talk to us through an interpreter about what these photographs meant. We think of these people as unsophisticated, but it was exciting to discover how effective they were in telling stories. In every strip of negatives, there was a story - one full of paradox, contrast, and contradiction."

For instance, most of the photos cut off people's feet. "At first, I thought the villagers had just aimed wrong," Zaltman says. "But it turns out that being barefoot is a sign of poverty. Even though everyone was barefoot, people wanted to hide that - which is another important message."

Zaltman knew he was onto something. He just wasn't sure what. So when he returned to Pitt, he began experimenting with a new methodology, often with the help of Robin Coulter, one of his star PhD students. At first, the researchers gave participants cameras and told them to shoot images that captured their thoughts and feelings about a particular product or service. But subjects often had difficulty taking exactly the pictures they desired, so Zaltman and Coulter allowed them to select images from magazines and newspapers. Around this time, Zaltman says, "I also got interested in digital imaging." And in his spare moments, he studied some of the breakthrough research in neuroscience. Crossing the borders of many disciplines, Zaltman began to map a new approach to marketing.

In its final form, the approach recalls the surrealist movement in literature and art, which reached its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than depict our conscious perception of the physical world, the surrealists sought to portray the subconscious, particularly as it was revealed in dreams. Visual art of the period often depicted melting clocks and liquid trees, incongruously positioned against hallucinatory landscapes. Zaltman has brought that sensibility to the world of market research. Goodbye, Gallup. Hello, Dali.

In fact, Zaltman's approach stretches from those barefoot villagers in Nepal to the quote, taken from surrealist painter Rene Magritte, that opens his course syllabus: "Everything we see hides something else we want to see."

Brain-Scan Marketing

On a bed in Massachusetts General Hospital, a woman lies on her back, her head held motionless beneath a specially molded face mask. She breathes slowly and a bit tentatively. With each breath, she inhales a few radioactive particles - invisible messengers that enter her bloodstream, where they can easily be tracked. Her head rests in a small chamber that looks like a giant frosted donut. Then the experiment begins. A scientist slips a cassette into a tape player, and a voice describes the car dealership from hell - cigarette-stained linoleum floors, garish lights, an overbearing salesforce. In another room, a computer paints a picture of what's happening inside her brain.

This is one of ZMET's next frontiers. With Stephen Kosslyn, a Mind, Brain, Behavior faculty member, Zaltman has begun using positron emission tomography (brain scans) to see how - or more precisely, where - consumers think. In the pair's first and only study, subjects were read descriptions of three car dealerships - one good, one bad, one humdrum - while researchers monitored blood flow through their brains.

"Sure enough," Zaltman says, "we found that when we played the audiotape of negative experiences, the area in the right brain associated with negative thoughts lit up." In particular, Kosslyn says, descriptions of the sleazy car dealership excited the subjects' right frontal lobe - the area of the brain associated with the primitive instinct of withdrawal. When they heard descriptions of the more welcoming dealerships - nice carpeting, gleaming computers, helpful staff - parts of the brain associated with positive emotions lit up instead. Tinker a little more with the description, and you could design the car dealership of people's dreams, a retail setting that you know will tickle their brains and move their feet.