"Your contract with the [TV] network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Anytime you skip a commercial...you're actually stealing the programming."
—Jamie Kellner, chairman and CEO, Turner Broadcasting

Kellner added: "I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom."

WHAT EVERY LUSH WANTS

PART 1

A new system could make it less likely that anyone will ever have to sit there trying to catch the bartender’s eye to get a refill. The system, developed by Paul Dietz and a team at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (www.merl.com), coats glasses with a clear, conducting material that provides a way of measuring how full they are. A thin radio-frequency coil in the base transmits the information wirelessly, so the bartender or waiter can be alerted when a glass is empty. Bottoms up.

PART 2

In England, some inventors have developed a wireless computer that straps onto the wrist and directs the wearer to the nearest pub. The system uses the satellite-based Global Positioning System to determine the wearer’s location, then dips into a database to provide the addresses of the four nearest pubs on the computer’s screen.

The gizmo, called eSleeve, recognizes the wearer’s voice and can even help drunken revelers find their way home, according to Bristol University inventors Cliff Randell and Henk Muller. “It works perfectly,” Randell says, “but might have trouble recognizing your voice after one too many pints.”

THE WORLD’S NASTIEST VIRUS

We recently received this dire e-mail warning:

“If you receive an e-mail titled ‘Badtimes,’ delete it IMMEDIATELY. Do not open it. It will not only erase everything on your hard drive, but it will also delete anything on disks within 20 feet of your computer. It demagnetizes the strips on ALL of your credit cards. It reprograms your ATM access code, messes up the tracking on your VCR, and uses subspace field harmonics to scratch any CDs you attempt to play. It will program your phone auto dial to call only 900 numbers. This virus will mix antifreeze into your fish tank.

“It will cause your toilet to flush while you are showering. It will drink ALL your beer. FOR GOD’S SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING? It will leave dirty underwear on the coffee table when you are expecting company. It will replace your shampoo with Nair and your Nair with Rogaine.”

Recipients are free to believe this.

GETTING INSIDE CUSTOMERS' HEADS

Although he began his career by developing questionnaires, Gerald Zaltman no longer thinks much of this kind of marketing research. The iconoclastic Harvard Business School marketing professor has an even lower opinion of focus groups.

Zaltman says it is a mistake to take customer statements at face value. Instead, he says it is crucial to probe people’s deep, unconscious motivations, as he has done for many corporate clients, including Hallmark Cards Inc. (www.hallmark.com), Nestlé S.A. (www.nestle.com), General Motors Corp. (www.gm.com), and Reebok International Ltd. (www.reebok.com). Indeed, Coca-Cola Co. (www.coca-cola.com) and Procter & Gamble Co. (www.pg.com) swear by his approach.

The origins of his Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique stem from brain science and from an experience in remote Nepal. There, Zaltman asked villagers to describe their lives by taking pictures with disposable cameras. The compositions were richly complex and sophisticated. Initially, because people’s feet were cut off in many pictures, Zaltman thought the villagers were misusing the cameras. Then he learned that they viewed their bare feet as signs of poverty and were deliberately hiding them.

As Zaltman explains in the interview that follows, the results helped him understand that people will reveal more about themselves through images than they can ever express in the words or numbers that marketers typically use.

GERALD ZALTMAN: Most advertising is based on the idea that you can inject a meaning into consumers, that you can inoculate them with it. When advertisers evaluate ads, they focus mainly on what consumers can remember and whether they liked an ad. That does not measure impact, however.

Actually, the impact of an advertisement is to prime consumers to create a story in their minds. But there is a fundamental failure to understand how that happens.

Something similar occurs with new products. The company introducing them usually doesn’t understand sufficiently the anatomy—the experience—of the problem consumers are trying to solve.

That so many new products fail tells you something is wrong with current approaches to understanding and relating to consumers.

Probably 95% of what drives human decisions comes from the unconscious mind. So understanding the storytelling process that springs from an ad or understanding the anatomy of a consumer’s need requires digging deeply into unconscious thoughts and feelings.

CONTEXT: Why don’t more companies do that?

ZALTMAN: There is a reluctance to give up familiar tools, especially if it requires learning new ideas and using those ideas in new ways.

Those familiar tools can work in some situations. Focus groups work if you want to know, for instance, how easy it is to use a prototype of a product. Surveys—the methodology I was trained on—work well in situations where companies have lots of experience and know they are addressing all the relevant issues. Surveys are great for getting the velocity, once you know which direction the wind is blowing.

CONTEXT: Tell me a bit about your approach.

ZALTMAN: It is hard to describe in just a few words.

Our premise is that thinking involves metaphors, in the broadest sense of the term. So we rely heavily on images as metaphoric representations of deep thoughts and feelings as an initial source of our stimuli. These are images that the participants have to find themselves, not ones that we give them. We ask them to begin gathering the images about a week in advance. Then, when they come in for their one-on-one interviews, which last about two hours, they share those metaphors. We also help them explore those metaphors by, for instance, using their senses. Then we build a map showing the ideas and how they connect with the ideas of the other participants—usually 12 to 15 people who represent a market segment. The map illustrates the reasoning processes and the shared beliefs that ultimately drive behavior in that market segment.

To understand what is going on in a customer’s mind you need to help them look inward, open windows, and look into those windows—typically windows they hadn’t looked into before.