Understand Your Customers' Minds

Lol, is this the best Coca Cola commercial disguised as a Harvard infomercial?

on the Michelin ad - duh! thats what consumers are supposed to see/think/feel, its not a fucking metaphor

Absolutely disgusting. Zaltman is another ideologue in the tradition of Edward Bernays, nephew & abuser of Freuds theories on the unconscious. Advertising is tantamount to emotional blackmail. The adverts aim to 1) exploit the hyper controlled state of childhood by appealing to their sense of fantasy, followed by 2) the hijacking of parent-child bond (the child appeals to buy) in order to return a PROFIT. All we are to these people are potential coin-shitting machines! Reification at large!

You put too much weight on business's ability to coerce people's behavior against their will. People are given free will .. and the freedom to excercise good judgement and vote with their wallets .. bacause they seek to satisfy their own deepest needs, wants or desires.

@directorwvp2 First of all, it's very difficult to coerce someone to do something against their will. But even if you do, and it's not a good product, you will not succeed.

Coca-Cola changed the world not thanks to beautiful ads but thanks to a great product that has a great image associated.

Marketing starts with a need from a customer. Marketing doesn't create needs, but addresses them providing the best possible product or service.

The way I see it ... many customers don't really know what they need or want until a compnay first comes forward and anticipates those needs wants and desires first. The public wasn't saying give us the Mac .. or we demand the I-Phone ... the contrary. Steve Jobs has mastered this discipline better than 99.8% of all execs. Read Inside Steves Head, it's very enlightening in this respect. Curious to know what you think.

"The public wasn't saying give us the Mac"
Agreed. They were saying: "MS-DOS is a crime against humanity! I can't get productive with this PC!". Then Apple created the Mac.

"or we demand the I-Phone."
Agreed. They were saying: "These smartphones are not that smart. They have have a tiny screen and a tiny keyboard".
Then Apple created the iPhone.

In both cases, the pain was already there. Apple just cured it.

It starts with a pain. Whoever understands how to solve it, will succeed!

Amen! We're both in agreement then. Recognition of 'pain' often leads to innovation. Cool! I think Inside Steve's Head was a realy interesting business book. Have you had aln oppty to read it? I also loved Mavericks at Work by William Taylor ... and the World is Flat by Thomas Freidman.

brilliant