Unconscious Marketing: The Coca-Cola Revelations
When you hear a bottle of Coca-Cola being opened, does the pop-fizz sound wet your thirst for that first sip?
Or does it do something more, transporting you back in time to a happy, warm memory when your grandfather snapped open an eight-ounce bottle of the popular beverage?
Good brands promise a happy, satisfying, consistent experience. Great brands tap into your core memories and values at an often unobserved level to create an emotional tie that merely good brands can't replicate.
Brain Dump
And that's why Paul Michelman took to the psychiatrist's couch, to better understand how the Coca-Cola brand bounces around his psyche. But in this case the shrink was a pair of researcher/interviewers from ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique), a marketing research firm created by Harvard Business School professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman.
Michelman was peppered with questions for several hours about his feelings for Coke, and directed to create a collage of images/metaphors he associates with the product. It proved quite an emotional experience, he reports in a Harvard Business blog post, Why I Underwent Psychoanalysis in the name of Coca-Cola.
"Stage one, the image-clipping, was both fun and thought provoking. It forced me to pause and really think about what Coca-Cola meant to me. But in no way did it prepare me for stages two and three, which comprised nearly two hours of interviews with two members of Jerry's team who succeeded in eliciting thoughts and feelings about Coca-Cola I had no idea I had."The piece and accompanying video interview with Zaltman, who authored the recently released Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers, is an eye-opening journey into just how powerful brands can be on the consumer psyche.
In the post analysis, it turns out that Michelman associates Coke not only with a connection with his grandfather but also with feelings about control, transformation, and balance. His collage included a photo of Tiger Woods, but you'll have to view the interview to learn the connection in Michelman's mind between the world's most famous golfer and the world's most famous soft drink.
What brands do their magic voodoo on what you do so well?