A Study on the Consumers' Brand Cognition and Design Strategy by ZMET

The research used Means-End Chain as theory basis to combine the consumers’ inclinations sense to form the chain-relation as “attributes-resultvalue”, using a new Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique to analyze the high involvement people thoughts and feelings to find out about the consumer’s profound concept. Personal interview data was examined in the application of qualitative analysis of Laddering Technique and content analysis method, so as to explore the hierarchical relations of customers’ cognitive value, and to build up their mental map and hierarchical value map (HVM). Based on the collected HVM elicited from the study, it has shown that the consumers’ ultimate values through 73 components are “pleasure”, ”commoditization”, ”agelong power”, “free and easy”, “exhilaration”, ”experience of Japanesque life”, “progress in personal sense. he results of the research help designer understand precisely the detailed product in accordance’ deep thoughts, as well as the factors that affect customers’ buying behavior.