Current approaches to customer data gathering may not elicit the insight we need to be truly effective over the long-term. The limitations of technology may be particularly problematic.

"CRM tools enable you to collect a lot of rich data about a customer's frequency and time of purchase, the size of her orders, and what she thinks of your company," says Harvard Business School marketing professor Gerald Zaltman. "That's necessary but not sufficient data: It doesn't tell you anything about why customers do what they do, think what they think, and why they like or don't like your products. Getting that level of insight requires more intensive interactions with customers than CRM tools permit."

Zaltman contends companies need to develop "poetic insight into customers — a deep knowledge that enables you to intuit their answers to questions you haven't even asked them."

As he explains in his recent book, How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), Zaltman conducts one-on-one interviews with customers to elicit beliefs, emotions, intentions, and often unconscious attitudes that people have about a product or brand. He uses this information to create a "a consensus map" -- a framework to illustrate customer experiences and emotional connections in relation to a company's offering or offerings.

General Motors used Zaltman's "metaphor elicitation approach" to learn, as expected, that customers associate GM products with quality and competitive price. However, GM also discovered that customers have a "patriotic" connection to the company. Purchasing a GM car is related to their desire to support American jobs and fulfill larger obligations to their country.

Based on the consensus map, GM's managers in the US redesigned the customer experience at dealerships and incorporated new patriotic messages into company advertising. Overseas managers appealed to patriotic associations in their own countries. Such actions, apparently, are poetry in motion.