Harvard marketing professor Gerald Zaltman reminds us that we’ve learned more in the last 10 years about how the brain works, than in previous history. To unearth customer’s desires we need to use new tools to “mind the unconscious” of our customers. I’ll encourage anyone to read his latest book, “How Customers Think,” to get the full scope. Here’s a practical research tool we’ve found very effective in our client engagements: Instead of asking trite questions about what consumers think about the brand, ask customers what they think the brand thinks of them!

Zaltman recounts a study where consumers were asked what they thought of the brand Mercedes. Consumers gave the predictable positive responses, such as “good styling” and “comfort,” along with some negative responses. However, when the same consumers were asked what they thought Mercedes thinks of them, a number of negative answers surfaced. Customers made comments like “They don’t think of us,” “We’re sheep,” “They think we have money to burn,” “They think I’m a child that doesn’t know better.” By asking this question, researchers unearthed a number of negative connotations that sparked important insights. Such insights are rarely uncovered in traditional marketing and communication research, which tends to be confirmatory rather than exploratory; it’s conducted to prove a point rather than explore new insights and ideas. Zaltman urges marketers to question their questions. The process of framing new questions can expose a hidden wellspring of new insights.

One of the most exciting new developments in the field of marketing and communication is the emergence of a new method for assessing and managing return-on-investment. This method, called Marketing Mix Modeling, is a statistical analysis of marketing performance, including PR, even when the marketing may be varied, simultaneous and continuous. The big news for PR professionals is that PR consistently delivers the best ROI of any marketing agent. Having worked with a few dozen of these in categories as diverse as financial services, consumer products, automobiles and entertainment, PR delivers as much as $8.00 in sales for every dollar spent while mass market TV advertising, for example, delivers about $1.10. Price promotions LOSE $.25 on the dollar. Does PR build brands? Absolutely and in the most meaningful of ways.