I happened to go to a fancy New York restaurant this weekend and was reminded of why most service oriented businesses get the customer experience wrong. Whether it’s a bank or a restaurant, customer expectations are grounded not just in “product”, but an expectation that involves feelings and expectations. The restaurant was Tao and the waiter, who we collectively labeled the wannabee Vin Diesel with the California Girl attitude – did not meet our expectations. I won’t tell you about the dumpling theft and the cinnamon latte NOT – as it was way too painful. Needless to say this overpriced overdone arrogance of a restaurant will not be revisited. So how do you get your act together?
This is an excerpt from one of my in progress books about how to get at that “feeling” in the design stage of an offering… ZMET 101:
There are more advanced tools that can be applied to empathetic and user centered design, particularly when the data lacks emotional context. For light duty service redesign the SERVQUAL model should meet most needs. As the complexity grows then more advanced multi-variate techniques, such as factor analysis should be applied. Finally a method such as Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique can be used, either stand-alone or as a complement to other techniques, when the gap suggests a more experiential approach is needed.
The Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, a.k.a ZMET, is a form of focus group that uses images and metaphors to help customers surface their thoughts and feelings about a specific topic. Another way to think about this is that the analysis goes very narrow, yet deep, to get at design insights. ZMET techniques are designed to get at the psychological motivations to help develop segmentation based on emotional needs categories (versus demographic categories).
There are a few tenets about ZMET. First, most often the consumer is unaware of the thoughts and emotions guiding their decision. Second, a picture really is word a thousand words. Finally, most humans respond better to a metaphorical image.
ZMET can be done either as one-on-one interviews or focus groups. Customer interaction sessions are focused on getting at beliefs, intent, emotions, and other unconscious choices a customer makes. One output of the process is a consensus map, which illustrates the constructs the customers have created. For example, Zaltman worked with GM and uncovered that GM buyers often linked the GM name to being patriotic and enabling that patriotism (which went well beyond helping GM workers keep their job). The GM dealers then added hints of patriotic themes in media and in-store advertising.
The beauty of ZMET is that it generally tends to overcome predisposition and expectations that researchers might have. Second, ZMET works to identify marketing approaches that get the consumer involved in the work. It’s clear that emotional and passionate angles do play an enormous role in the choices made by customers – from fear driven techniques to humor to tapping into deep emotional needs.
The sequence of steps is:
1) Storytelling: Have each customer, of a group of about 25, create a collage of images and tell their story about what the collage of images means to them.
2) Image Gaps: Ask what’s missing from the picture they could not create an image of and explain the relevance.
3) Sort: Participants then work together to group the pictures into common themes.
4) Elicit Constructs: Using a structured question technique a trained researcher explores to get at constructs. The technique is a modified form of laddering.
5) Relevance Tagging: The participants work together to tag the most relevant image to the construct.
6) Opposites: The researchers explore the images to get participants to describe what the construct is not.
7) Sensory Projection: The research question at this step is to explore what does and does not describe the six senses: taste, touch, smell, sound, color, and emotion.
8) Mental Map: The customer creates their own mental map of how the constructs map.
9) Image Refresh: A new collage is created to establish the collective constructs.
10) Consensus Map: A final casual map of the most important constructs is completed to guide marketing.
Here’s one of the more often told stories about ZMET and its key differences:
Glenda Green, a market research manager at DuPont, which manufactures fibers for women’s hosiery, said: “Conventional research told us that women most hated wearing panty hose. We did tremendous research – telephone interviews, mall intercept interviews, everything you can think of. Nonetheless, we thought there was a dimension of this we were missing”. Then professor Zaltman was invited to take a closer look at the issue. As usual, he first asked: “What are your thoughts and feelings about buying and wearing panty hose?”
To answer, women initiated the process of selecting about a dozen pictures from magazines, catalogs and family photo albums that best represented their thoughts and feelings. During the individual interview with the ZMET researcher these pictures were used to undergo a thorough interrogation of about two hours, followed by a session with a digital imager to produce a general collage of the most significant images.
It is reported that women brought images of steel bands strangling trees, of twisted telephone cords, and of fence posts encased in a tight plastic wrap. This is a straightforward link to the uncomfortable perception of hosiery, but they also chose picture of two African masks hanging on a bare wall, of an ice-cream sundae spilled on the ground, of a luxury car and of flowers peacefully resting in a vase.
Here is the much more subtle part that requires great skills and a solid method to figure out what was meant by these consumers. When the subjects discussed each picture with the specially trained interviewer-cum- therapist, the discovery was that: women do indeed hate wearing panty hose. Nonetheless, it is more complicated than that: it is not so much that women have a black and white vision of nylons, namely love-hate relationship. Rather they have a like-hate relationship which enables the company producing them to gently play around the many hints revealed by the method.
Green recalls. “We got intensity, texture, and depth that we had never gotten from other studies. This was the first time we heard positive things that we could act on”. What became evident was that the mixed relationship showed aspects of the product that could be used to improve its image. For example, the person who picked the image of the fence posts encased in plastic wrap also chose the picture of the vase of flowers: wearing the panty hose made her feel thin and tall. The expensive car represented the feeling of luxury. Finally, the images also brought out subtleties related to more intimate sexual issues. As Green remembers: “Women would say, they make my legs feel longer. Why is it important to have long legs? Because men like long legs. Why do men like long legs? Because they are sexy. And eventually women would say they wanted to feel sexy to men. You do not get that in a straight interview”. These findings then led hosiery manufacturers and retailers to alter their advertising contents to include not only images of super competent career women but also images of sexiness and allure.
The art of facilitating the ZMET method lies in the fourth or laddering step. In many ways it uses the same principles used in root cause, or cause and effect analysis. The art is to elicit the bias without creating response bias. The ladders may go out – which in ZMET language means exploring the meaning. The ladders may go up, which means understanding the consequences. The ladders may go down which means explain the cause. ZMET should be used when the gap is about trying to create an image (i.e. Nike, Godiva, etc.). While it is heavily used in brand development, it has a place to help improve the quality of VOC in projects focused on improving the customer experience.
Do you really know the emotional expectations your customers have of your service proposition and your brand?
