Gerald Zaltman is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author and editor of 20 books, most recently How Customers Think (2003) and Marketing Metaphoria (2008).
In 2008, Zaltman was honored with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Buck Weaver Award sponsored by General Motors for outstanding work in bringing knowledge and practice together.
Deep metaphors are unconscious "basic orienting structures of human thought" that affect how people process and react to information or a stimulus.
Zaltman realized just how powerful the use of images “owned” by those being interviewed were in gaining a deep understanding of their implicit or tacit assumptions and beliefs.
The Nepalese did not want to embarrass their friends and neighbors by showing their bare feet, which was a sign of poverty, and for this reason deliberately chose to leave it out of the photographic record.
ZMET draws on a variety of disciplines including neurobiology, psychology, semiotics, linguistics, and art theory to elicit metaphors that can reveal how a person conceptualizes a given topic.
This data provides further insight and understanding which can be used in creating an appropriate marketing campaign for a product, improving inter-office communications and determining the presence of pre-existing biases or beliefs.