Communicative Codes of Visual Nature for Business Communications

The use of communication codes for efficiency communication programming (infogramming) is an innovative approach to soft support for management decisions. This approach was proposed by Richard H. Thaler and named Nudge. However, the author of this approach did not offer efficiency tools for the practical application of this innovation in supporting solutions. We offer an author’s tool for the practical implementation of Nudge – infographic, so to speak- information programming of decision makers to transform decisions from the irrational field of the mind to the rational one through communication codes of a visual nature. The practitioners require communication code to form such communications. They are certainly different for divers target environment. Their identification requires complex marketing research. Recently, a scientific and methodological discussion has been held on the relevance of the results obtained through sociological surveys as a method of marketing research. In our opinion these discussions lead to a fair conclusion about the low relevance of the results of opinion polls due to a number of factors affecting this parameter. The most convincing explanations about the traps that the researchers introduce the method of opinion polls are reflected in the work of recognized authorities in marketing research. An alternative to the methodology of the opinion poll is the in-depth interview method, which assumes, in contrast to the method of opinion polls, a qualitative study that answers the questions of “how”, “in what way”, etc. At the same time, qualitative research has its own traps, consisting in a small number of respondents. As a rule, this number is about 3–6 people. For this reason, many researchers do not consider the results of such studies to be practically valuable. In this regard, the authors of this article face the task of proposing a hybrid method that is quantitative in terms of the number of respondents and qualitative in terms of avoiding the traps of social surveys. The authors confirm the practical value of the proposed hybrid method by comparing the results of quantitative and qualitative research methods of the same target environment. The metaphor extraction methodology proposed by Gerald Zaltman (ZMET) was used in order to escape the traps of quantitative research methods.