Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

Disney Company, as well as nonprofit groups and governments. 69 Departing
from the focus-group method that is the basis of traditional marketing studies,
Olson Zaltman conducts intensive one-on-one interviews with individual
consumers, using a patented technique it calls “metaphor elicitation.” Five days
before each interview, the subject is asked to collect six to eight pictures that
reflect how they would answer a simple question related to the client’s product
or service: “What are your thoughts and feelings about X and the role X plays
in your life?” Thus if X were health care, the subject might clip a magazine
image of shark-infested waters, symbolizing how treacherous it can be trying to
find good care. Another person might bring a photo of a healthy, laughing
baby, to capture the good things the medical profession brings us. The images,
which are metaphors themselves, are the starting point for a probing interview
lasting two to three hours that seeks to uncover the subject’s unconscious
thought processes about the topic, or what they “don’t know they know.” In
particular the interviewer is looking for what Zaltman calls “deep metaphors,”
or broad concepts that people use to organize and impose meaning on
information. Examples of deep metaphors are: Journey, Transformation,
Control, Container and Resource. At the end of the interview, the subject sits
at a screen and makes a collage from digital scans of the images, which serves
as a visual summary of the discussion. The client ultimately receives a report
distilling the interviews into relevant themes and suggesting implications for the
client’s business.
Condé Nast hired Olson Zaltman to investigate how consumers respond
to magazine and television advertisements and, implicitly, if there is a difference
in the response. A 2003 study by the TiVo company had found that the more
consumers like a television program, the more likely they are to record it and to
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