DOI: 10.2501/JAR-54-4-373-376 December 2014 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH 373 INTRODUCTION Peter Drucker had a famous truism: The purpose of a business is to create a customer. What is more central to customer creation than advertising? This is where firm and customer minds meet, and the mind of the market is established. And what is more central to the success of this meeting than the qual- ity of insights that enter communications strategy and execution? Yet in the author’s ongoing in-depth interviews with marketing executives, managers, and researchers, imaginative thinking is cited as advertising’s dark continent—its Achilles’ heel. Quality research also is described as “essential.” Having deep insights from customers is the basis for creating deep insights about them. Fortunately, data capture and processing procedures always are improving. Methods for eliciting and encoding conscious and unconscious customer thought and behavior are increasingly sophisticated and reveal- ing. Data indeed are becoming “big” in many ways. Do corresponding advances exist, however, in the practice of generating big insights? It appears not. A senior executive in a pharmaceuticals com- pany summarized what many others say: “A prob- lem has to become really ugly before [brand teams] will question how they are thinking [about it] and how they are using their [market] research.” An automotive parts executive, commenting on the use of research in his firm, added, “These guys are afraid of shadows. They avoid gray areas. Data have to be black and white. If it is only suggestive, they won’t touch it.” The ideas in this essay involve insight develop- ment. They are based in part on hundreds of ZMET (Zaltman and Coulter, 1995) interviews conducted over time with bold-thinking executives, manag- ers, and researchers. The interviews focused on the development of insights involving messy, ill- structured problems. One central idea that emerges is the need to avoid premature reflective closure. This is the tendency to treat facts as insights and leap directly from data to action. It is common when research is used to prove points rather than as fuel for imaginative insight. What an Insight Is and Is Not “Aha!” “I’ve got it!” “It just occurred to me that …” “I know!” “Now I see.” “Oh!” These expressions indicate an insight has occurred, but what exactly has happened? A simple definition has emerged from the author’s interviews: An insight is a realization—an idea—that feels correct; it is a thought experienced as true at the moment it reaches awareness. Insights arise from the mind’s natural meaning construction activities as it grapples with data. Falling GERALD ZALTMAN Harvard Business School gzaltman@hbs.edu Are You Mistaking Facts for Insights? Lighting up Advertising’s Dark Continent of Imagination Speaker’s Box Editor’s Note: A major theme underlying Zaltman’s research is how managers and customers represent and apply their ideas and knowledge. In addition to two other patents involving neuroscience and market- ing, his Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) is a method used to probe how unconscious thinking drives behavior. ZMET (the first patented market research tool in the United States) draws on art theory, linguistics, neurobiology, psychology, and semiotics to reveal how people conceptualize any given topic. It has been applied to managers and consumers in relation to marketing and marketing communica- tions decision making. The tool has its origins with research undertaken by Zaltman in remote areas of Nepal. There, he gave cameras to locals to take pictures of important things and events in their lives, which were found to provide a deep understanding of their implicit or tacit assumptions and beliefs. In this Speaker’s Box, Dr. Zaltman assesses the relationship between facts and insights. His central argument is that marketing insights arise when managers apply their mental models of the world and their knowledge and experience to imbue these facts with meaning.