How collages reveal your deepest thoughts: A guide to consumers' minds

Book excerpt: A deeper understanding of how consumers think, feel and act is vital to the success of management and provides valuable information for managerial decision making in many areas of business. One key to this understanding is brand knowledge, which is the representation of a brand in consumers’ minds. Unfortunately, a substantial amount of relevant knowledge within people’s minds is unconscious and cannot be retrieved, accessed and recalled by consumers. As a consequence, certain methods of retrieval are required, such as projective techniques. The method this book works with is the collage technique, an expressive projective method. The aim of this book is to create a multi-layered approach that facilitates the interpretation of collages without the need of any additional information given by the participants, based on metaphor analysis, color theory, a communication model and structural analysis.