Author: Clotaire Rapaille
Backstory:
Thirty years ago, Clotaire Rapaille was a Parisian psychoanalyst studying autistic children when a businessman at Nestlé suggested that Rapaille’s work decoding subconscious imprinting could be used to market instant coffee to tea-drinking Japan. Not only were Nestlé’s coffee-selling strategies affected, but Rapaille embarked on a new career of applying cultural anthropology to the corporate world. Today, the internationally renowned consultant is based in New York, and his firm, Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, is retained by half of the Fortune 100 companies to assist in product marketing.
Total reading time: 240 minutes
First published: 2006
Key passages:
“Imprints vary from culture to culture. If I could get to the source of these imprints—if I could somehow ‘decode’ elements of culture to discover the emotions and meanings attached to them—I would learn a great deal about human behavior and how it varies across the planet. This set me on the course of my life’s work.”
“American culture exhibits many of the traits consistent with adolescence: intense focus on the “now,” dramatic mood swings, a constant need for exploration and challenge to authority, a fascination with extremes, openness to change and reinvention, and a strong belief that mistakes warrant second chances.”
“If work means ‘who we are,’ then it is perfectly understandable that we seek so much meaning in our jobs. If our jobs feel meaningless, then ‘who we are’ is meaningless as well.”
Synopsis:
This fascinating, accessible read takes a look at how cultural mores shape people’s behavior, using analytical techniques that have helped Rapaille improve the profitability of products from coffee to cars for such companies as Nestlé and Chrysler. Addressing some two dozen archetypes—sex, beauty, youth, home, money, and even America itself—Rapaille shows how and why cultures interpret words associated with these archetypes differently and how that should affect the design and marketing strategies companies adopt in different regions.
By distilling societal biases to their emotional essence, Rapaille reveals a series of cultural codes that work subconsciously to affect our choices as consumers. For example, while working with Chrysler on a Jeep Wrangler campaign, Rapaille asked focus groups not what they wanted in a Jeep, but their earliest memories of the vehicle. “The stories had a strong recurring image … of riding free … the American West or the open plain,” he writes. “I returned to those wary Chrysler executives and told them the code word for Jeep in America is horse.” In France, Jeeps reminded people of American soldiers in World War II, so the code word there became liberator. For Rapaille, those two meanings dictate how Jeeps should be marketed in each country.
While the book is intended for corporate product-design and marketing divisions, it’s also a handy psychological tool for guiding our interactions with other cultures as well as reexamining ourselves. Also, Rapaille’s focus on American archetypes and his thesis that U.S. culture mimics adolescence (as if our obsession with Paris Hilton wasn’t a dead giveaway) offer readers in the States an opportunity for greater self-awareness and foreigners a window into our eccentricities.
