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

Clotaire Rapaille (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 6, 2006

Why are people around the world so very different? What makes us live, buy, even love as we do? The answers are in the codes.

In The Culture Code, internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of Codes as we grow up within our culture. These Codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the Codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do.

Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest-lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us.

In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes.

Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

French-born marketing consultant and psychoanalyst Rapaille takes a truism—different cultures are, well, different—and expands it by explaining how a nation's history and cultural myths are psychological templates to which its citizens respond unconsciously. Fair enough, but after that, it's all downhill. Rapaille intends his theory of culture codes to help us understand "why people do what they do," but the "fundamental archetypes" he offers are just trumped-up stereotypes. He often supports jarring pronouncements ("The Culture Code for perfection in America is DEATH") with preposterous generalizations and overstatements, e.g., Japanese men "seem utterly incapable of courtship or wooing a woman." Writing with the naïveté of someone who has learned about the world only through Hollywood films, he seems unaware that every person living within a nation's borders doesn't necessarily share the same cultural biases and references. Rapaille's successful consulting career is evidence that he's more convincing in the boardroom than he is on the page. Amid the overheated prose and dubious factoids, it's easy to overlook the book's scattered marketing proposals and employee-management tips. (June 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“This book is just plain astonishing! Filled with profound insights and ideas that have enormous consequences for today’s organizations. If you want to understand customers, Constituencies, and crowds, this book is required reading.”

--Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business (June 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767920562
• ISBN-13: 978-0767920568
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.8 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (100 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,735 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #81 in Books > Business & Investing > Marketing & Sales > Consumer Behavior

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Who is Clotaire Rapaille & why does he dress like Mozart? February 25, 2007

By George F. Simons

Format:Hardcover

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.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Started Strong but lost momentum July 24, 2007

By Mobile Point View by Paul Ruppert

Format:Paperback

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.

47 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Too potent for most people to handle June 15, 2006

By David Garfinkel

Format:Hardcover

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.