The following article is excerpted from Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers, by Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman. It is reprinted here with permission of Harvard Business Press.

In our work, we have come to refer to the process of thinking deeply as "workable wondering." Workable wondering involves the use of empirical, rigorous, and relevant information, also called "workable knowledge," to challenge our assumptions and to engage in disciplined imagination.1

It means more than collecting information. It means thinking deeply about the consumer insights that we have surfaced. It requires reading between the lines and detecting what else is present, well beyond what we already know.2

Some executives evaluate their staffs in terms of this ability. One told us, "It is not just the sense they make out of the information they have, it is how they add value by going beyond what they've got. That is what I look for. Do they dare to imagine?" Another executive said, "It is not what is in front of you that provides real competitive advantage. Competitors may have that, too. It is what you think that no else thinks to think, even when they have the same information."

Regarding their experiences in generating deep insights, every executive underscored the importance of contemplating that which is missing. An executive explained, "The 'Aha!' is in spotting the missing connection between the dots. It's there but no one else sees it until you point it out."

That is what happened when IBM brought out its first personal computer, and when Toyota introduced its Prius amid the craze for sports utility vehicles. Until those introductions, no one imagined a market.

Without workable wondering, many of the goods and services we now take for granted would not exist. Someone had to engage in deep, disciplined, and imaginative thinking to see such possibilities as the need for personal computers, energy-efficient automobiles, cell phones, iPods, and gourmet coffee houses.

Most executives in our interviews felt they were making progress in encouraging workable wondering and overcoming the depth deficit. But it is clearly an uphill battle, one that requires commitment at the very top.3

For example, General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt has established a class of projects now well-known as "imagination breakthroughs," consisting of ideas that are "really hard or really important" and might generate significant revenues over a three-year period, the time that GE usually takes to implement a new idea. "Imagination breakthroughs are a protected class of ideas—safe from the budget slashers because I've blessed each one."4

Immelt's strategy, which is succeeding, is to grow from a hundred such projects to a thousand by focusing more on imagination throughout the company. Immelt's innovation is to imagine beyond the short-term gain and to see future profits not driven solely by quarterly reports.

How Deep Metaphors Fuel Workable Wondering (and Bridge the "Say-Mean" Gap)

Obviously, the quality of a manager's thinking is closely linked to the quality of the information to think about. If deep insights from consumers are absent, then it matters little how imaginative managers are. A key requirement, then, for workable wondering—that is, for thinking deeply and imaginatively about consumers—is having deep insights from consumers.

Such insights come from (1) exploring beyond consumers' surface-level thinking and behavior into their unconscious mind, and (2) learning from their perspective why and how they think and do what they do.5

Deep metaphors can help us to gain these insights. By probing and analyzing their non-literal expressions, we can discover what consumers are actually experiencing relative to what they are saying about that experience.6 When given the right opportunity, consumers will usually reveal these hidden thoughts, regardless of background factors such as years of formal education.

When marketers empower consumers to explore their thinking and speak at length about a topic their expressions become rich and revealing. Consider these examples:

  • "Planning for my golden years is an uphill, rocky road." (40-year-old American female on financial planning)
  • "Chewing breath mints is like throwing a party for your mouth." (52-year-old French male discussing the benefits of breath mints)
  • "When I go to the theatre I feel like a young girl again." (36-year-old Spanish-American female on the meaning of the arts in her life)

Each statement is a figure of speech that suggests more than the idea that retirement planning is difficult or that chewing mints refreshes one's mouth.7 For example, by exploring in one-on-one interviews phrases like "an uphill, rocky road," a financial services firm revealed additional ideas involving frustration, challenge, disappointment, hard work, and luck. When the company explored those thoughts further, it identified other important ideas to consider in its decision-making.

These deeper ideas are not available from survey responses to statements such as "financial planning is difficult" or in focus groups where each participant has on average about 10 minutes of air time.

Figures of speech, then, often signal the presence of other ideas that tell a deeper, more meaningful story about consumers' experiences with goods and services than is revealed by direct questioning. Deep metaphors capture and reveal these deeper understandings, uncovered by deep, non-directive explorations of non-literal or figurative surface expressions.

For example, we found the following deep metaphors (in italics) in the studies that provided the quotes above:

  • Financial planning is a journey
  • Breath mints are a resource for renewal
  • The arts transform one life stage to another

In many ways, deep metaphors and emotions are siblings because both are...

  • Hard-wired in our brains
  • Shaped by social contexts and experiences
  • Unconscious operations
  • Vital perceptual and cognitive functions
  • Few in number
  • Universal: that is, the same at a basic level the world over

Of course, people vary in what triggers emotions such as fear, sadness, or joy and in how these emotions are expressed. Similarly, differences arise in how people experience a given deep metaphor. These differences are shaped by unique individual experiences and by social contexts, including the impact on consumers of a firm's marketing activities.8

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School.
Lindsay Zaltman is managing director of Olson Zaltman Associates (www.olsonzaltman.com).