The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do

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1. May 9th, 2010

   @ 12:16 am

   Peter Hupalo posted:

   “The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way To Understand Why People Around The World Live And Buy As They Do” by Clotaire Rapaille examines how different cultures view products, events, and concepts.

   Rapaille argues each product makes a unique imprint on members of any given culture. This imprint can be described in only a few words. For example, Rapaille says the American code for cars is “Identity,” while the German code for cars is “Engineering.”

   For the last thirty years, Rapaille, a cultural anthropologist, has helped international companies learn and understand these cultural codes by examining how consumers really feel about products.

   Rapaille worked with Chrysler to discover the code for Jeep. The American code for Jeep is “Horse,” a go-anywhere vehicle. Based on this, Rapaille suggested replacing square headlights with round ones, because horses have round eyes. Luxury interiors weren’t part of the code. The Jeep was then successfully marketed as a “horse” in America.

   In France and Germany, Jeeps were seen differently. People there associate them with the WWII liberation of Europe. Chrysler marketed Jeeps in Europe as symbols of freedom.

   According to Rapaille, most cultural imprints occur by a very early age. In America, many people love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because they ate as children. People associated the sandwiches with care and attention from mom. In other cultures the sandwiches might not have been imprinted at all.

   Cars also have a strong, positive imprint in America. Rapaille writes: “[Children] imprint the thrills associated with cars in their youth. Americans love cars and they love going out in them. Throughout the discovery sessions, participants told stories of their excited parents bringing home a new car, about the enjoyment and bonding that comes from families going out for drives together on the weekend, about the breathtaking first ride in a sports car. American children learn at an early age that cars are an essential and vaunted part of family life, that they bring joy and even family unity. When it is time for them to buy a car, this emotional connection guides them subconsciously. They want a car that feels special to them. …”

   Based upon his understanding of the American code for cars, Rapaille helped Chrysler develop the concept for the PT Cruiser. Rapaille writes: “It became obvious to me that because the emotion associated with driving and owning a car is so strong, the PT Cruiser needed to be a car people could feel strongly about. It needed to have a distinctive identity to justify such strong emotions. To create a strong identity and a new car at the same time, we decided to tap into something that already existed in the culture, a familiar unconscious structure. The one we chose was the gangster car, the kind of vehicle Al Capone famously drove. This became the PT Cruiser’s signature. It lent the car an extremely strong identity–there is nothing like it on the road today–and the customer responded. Again, if the Cruiser had been just another sedan, the public probably wouldn’t have even noticed it, but its distinctiveness tapped into something very emotional.”

   In addition to products, concepts like beauty, youth, health, home, dinner, money, shopping, luxury, work, and perfection are also imprinted with certain subconscious associations. Rapaille examines how each of these is imprinted in American culture. The George H.W. Bush campaign even hired Rapaille to discover the cultural code for the American Presidency.

   While many of Rapaille’s insights seem spot on, a few seem to be a bit of a stretch. Rapaille suggests being overweight isn’t a problem, but a solution. He says the American code for fat is “checking out.” This means people get fat, so they can withdraw from society. That seems a bit like asking for the cultural code for gravity. It doesn’t necessarily have a cultural explanation. It really seems more an issue of food tasting good and calories in and calories out at the waist.

   For marketers who want to better understand some of the cultural reasons why Americans behave as we do, I recommend “The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way To Understand Why People Around The World Live And Buy As They Do” by Clotaire Rapaille.
   
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. May 9th, 2010

   @ 1:56 am

   George F. Simons posted:

   Who?
   
   The first question is easy to answer. Clotaire Rapaille is a Frenchman who claims that a candy bar shared by a GI during the Liberation was a key imprint leading him to ultimately adopt the US as home. He holds a Masters in Political Science and in Psychology and a Doctorate in Medical Anthropology from the Sorbonne. As chairman of an organization called “Archetype Discoveries Worldwide” he shows how you too can become an archetypologist and learn the process of decoding culture. While he has taught at a long list of universities, he is better known as an advertising guru to top American corporations whom he helps discover the culture code that unlocks the door to successful marketing.

   Why?
   
   So why does he dress like Mozart? Perhaps because he uses a three movement orchestration that he calls “discovery” to penetrate to the heart of the social archetypes–to arrive at the code–the very deep “why” of human behavior, the trigger to an emotional response in the primitive brain that explains why people choose to do what they do and, especially of interest to his clientele, why they buy what they buy. The archetypal resonances of Mozart’s The Golden Flute and the passion arousing sounds of Timotheus’ lyre are what marketers and advertisers need to be “on code” or “off code” in ways that will essentially determine their success.

   When the author explains that the culture code for US eating habits is FUEL, while the French focus on pleasure, it goes a long way toward explaining why, after close to a decade in France, I am schizophrenic. Eating in a US restaurant, the check arrives the moment I have stopped. It is delivered by an attendant in that very instant when I have set down my desert or coffee spoon indicating that my “tank is full.” In France the check doesn’t come until I wonder to what dalliance my waiter might have discretely gone off, and then grudgingly bestir myself from the delights of table talk to return to the practicalities of life.

   Below are a few more of the US codes discussed in the book. While a number of other cultures come up in the discussion of the codes, I tease you with these few into finding the quite striking comparisons for yourself in its pages.

   US Cultural Code
   
   Automobile=Identity
   
   Love=False expectation
   
   Sex=Violence
   
   Alcohol=Gun
   
   Fat=Checking out
   
   Young=Movement
   
   Money=Proof

   Archetypes or Stereotypes?
   
   The codes are, of course, provocative, particularly to many USians in this case, because they correspond, not to how we rationalize our decisions,–what Rapaille calls our alibis–but how we are impelled toward them. Hence many of us are prone to shrug off if not aggressively attack any attempt at identifying or classifying us as “stereotyping.” Why then are we at same time so attracted to simple models of classifying people such as MBTI, Belbin, EI, etc? For Rapaille I suspect that this seeming paradox would be resolved in the juxtaposition of the code word ADOLESCENCE that marks the US character as well as the US code for quality, which is, IT WORKS.

   Before closing the author recounts his engagements with US corporations in search for the US culture code held by other national markets as well as their own codes and what is needed to mix and match in promoting US products abroad.

   Out of the box
   
   My purpose in this as in my other reviews is to search the significance of thinking for our intercultural field, which is tending to become fossilized in some of its classical research, models and theories of culture. The best books about culture that I read every year are generally not written by people who call themselves interculturalists but by people who lead me outside my box. Rapaille applies a Jungian archetype analysis based on such widely disparate sources as on his work with autistic children and his observation of successful brujos–these are not places where most of us spend our time.

   In this respect, I found The Culture Code both affirming and tantalizing. It is affirming, because it is very much aligned with training in Jungian and Gestalt psychology that was a strong part of my education and because of my current work in the development of products in the Cultural Detective line that investigate core or key values of cultures as motives of behavior. His work also seems to confirm that the cultural stories we learn are not ingrained in us so much by their constant repetition but by their initial impact. The concept of Prägnanz generated in Gestalt psychology and Lakoff’s understanding of semiotic imprinting support this and suggest that cultural codes as identified by Rapaille are more rooted in the physical and historical experience that interculturalists have tended to believe. Nature and Nurture may be more in cahoots with each other rather than the polarities we tend to make of them.

   The Culture Code is also tantalizing, because it leaves me hungry for missing detail in Rapaille’s process that I as a professional am eager to lay my hands on. This being said, the book itself brushes past me, being brilliantly “on code” for the US market, i.e., IT WORKS!-witness its stand on several bestseller lists.

   My country, `tis of thee I sing…
   
   The Culture Code ends in a paean that addresses Rapaille’s principles of discovery to AMERICA, that larger than life DREAM that the US has of itself–perhaps a code word in its own right. Like many immigrants before him, AMERICA is obviously the author’s Promised Land. It is a land that ever looks to a MOSES to lead it and, when needed, regenerate its spirit of “never growing up” and “never giving up,” above all never yielding to the crime of pessimism. Of course confrontation with the shadow, as Jung would put it, is locked in each of the culture codes for the USA as in those of all other lands, but on these shores, woe to him who turns that key.
   
   Rating: 4 / 5

3. May 9th, 2010

   @ 4:21 am

   David Garfinkel posted:

   Clotaire Rapaille reminds me a little of a somewhat softened, better educated and French version of the Jack Nicholson character in that pivotal moment of “A Few Good Men” where he blurts out: “You can’t handle the truth!”

   The author is confrontive in the extreme, but in an intellectually assertive and nonviolent way. He has truly mined some of the cloaked messages going on as endless tape loops in the unconscious minds of individuals and their national cultures – especially, but not exclusively, Americans.

   I smiled knowingly when I read the Publisher’s Weekly review at the top of this page. The reviewer roundly attacks the author for the statement about Japanese men and romance. I live in San Francisco and I have dated a number of Japanese women from Japan. I would have to say based on my experience that it is the PW reviewer who is looking at life through the preposterous prism of a Hollywood lens, and it is Dr. Rapaille who is right in touch with street-level reality.

   The book’s subtitle overpromises a little (as subtitles are wont to do) in that this book won’t give you an entirely new world view from which to understand everything about everybody. It won’t.

   But the number of stunning insights (all of which resonated with me, as an experienced marketer) about: sex… seduction… men’s view of women… money… food… alcohol… beauty… and being fat…

   … will cause the thoughtful, inquiring and willing-to-learn reader to see things in a new way and understand parts of his world a lot better.

   This is a great book and well worth reading if you are interested in psychology, marketing, and/or the world the way it is and the way it is likely to be for years to come.
   Rating: 5 / 5

4. May 9th, 2010

   @ 5:14 am

   Mobile Point View by Paul Ruppert posted:

   Having marketed and sold in every region of the globe, I was naturally drawn to Clotaire Rapaille’s “The Culture Code.” Rapaille utlizes a one word “code word” which you could characterize an “emoticon descriptor” for a product or service, such as “HORSE” for the the Jeep Wrangler, or “DISAPPOINTMENT” for Love. He caught my interest up front with an overview of the process behind his code labeling, but as the book progressed, never provided a road map as to the analysis behind the process except the end results surrounding vanity areas of health, beauty, sex, home, money and other emotional areas. But nothing regarding hard business analysis. His premise is that we all look at the world differently due to our childhood driven, hard wired cultural experiences, causing stark differences between the emotional quotient of Europeans, Asians and Americans. At the end, the chapters were fairly repetitive recapping the first, and strongest in the book.
   Rating: 2 / 5

5. May 9th, 2010

   @ 5:51 am

   Gilberto Villahermosa posted:

   This is a brilliant book! It is extremely well written, incredibly interesting and tremendously insightful. I bought it after reading a page at random and was hooked.

   In “The Culture Code” Frenchman turned American, Clotaire Rapaille, an expert on culture coding and adviser to many of the world’s largest and most successful companies, unlocks the secrets to understanding why people in America, Europe and Asia live and buy as they do. Everything centers around how each nation sees itself and others, especially America. These codes are important to companies trying to sell their goods and ideas abroad. But they also reveal a great deal about us.

   The French code for France, for example is Idea, while the code for America is Space Travelers. The German code for Germany is Order, while that for America is John Wayne. The English code for England is Class, while that for America is Unashamedly Abundant. And the American code for America is Dream.

   “Dreams have driven this culture from its earliest days,” writes Dr. Rapaille, with a beauty and passion that lends much to his French roots. “The dream of explorers discovering the New World. The dream of pioneers opening the West. The dream of Founding Fathers imagining a new form of union. The dream of entrepreneurs forging the Industrial Revolution. The dream of immigrants coming to a land of hope. The dream of a new group of explorers landing safely on the moon.”

   Rapaille shows that, while the Europeans fail to understand Americans and many even hope we will fail in the future, they admire our country and Americans for our boundless sense of youth, energy and hope.

   Rapaille, who arrived in this country penniless, due to a French law which froze the assets of any France citizen leaving the country, is clearly very much in love with his adopted country and has become more American than many born here, for he has pursued his dreams and prospered. His ideas and inspiring writing style certainly reflect this. But the author is unduly harsh toward his country of birth and the Europeans in general.

   Having lived in Europe and traveled throughout the continent for almost eleven years, I very much value and appreciate the culture of my French, German, and Dutch friends and neighbors. Yes, we live our lives by different codes, but in the end we are really not as different as Dr. Rapaille would have us believe. We all desire a better life for ourselves and, especially, our children. We all worry about a growing trend toward conflict in the world and insecurity at home. And we all dream of a better world. Indeed, we are witnessing both the convergence and clash of culture codes.

   “The Culture Code” is packed with ideas that will benefit everyone from the average American, to the businessman, to the politician. It is truly an insightful and uplifting journey.
   Rating: 5 / 5