The ZMET Methodology
Using ZMET, D2D Fund is probing the deepest, most intimate, and least well- articulated feelings of poor and working poor Americans regarding money, saving, and personal finances. Insights from this research will inform the development of new marketing tools, including collateral, aimed at increasing saving among lower income consumers.
To understand these cues, specially trained ZMET interviewers probe—but never prompt—for fundamental, often unexamined, and unconscious feelings and beliefs that drive consumers’ actions.
Participants are asked to prepare for sessions by clipping pictures that speak to them about the topic of the ZMET study. Using these clipped images as a guide, participants tell the stories that relate their experience sand thoughts around the study topic. Through this process, researchers unpack the implicit metaphors and archetypal images
ZMET interviews culminate in participant-directed creation of a digital image collage (image above), which combines the images chosen by the interviewee as part of a meaningful story about a product, brand, institution, or concept.
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What is ZMET?
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ZMET applies lessons from psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and sociology to discern consumers’ unconscious feelings about products, brands, institutions, and the concepts on which products are based. The technique recognizes that 95% of human decision making and thinking occurs in the unconscious mind. With traditional consumer research tools like surveys and focus groups, most people are unable to articulate what genuinely motivates their behavior—what lies beyond or beneath rational thought. Equally important, human beings are primarily visual and nonverbal communicators, meaning consumer marketing is most effective when it is framed in the images and symbols that resonate deeply and cue customer action.