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

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: discovery sessions, biological scheme, most powerful memory, Clotaire Rapaille, The English, United States (more...)

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
--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (June 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767920562
• ISBN-13: 978-0767920568
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (66 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #137,250 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Book For Understanding Marketing To Different Cultures, June 12, 2006

By	Peter Hupalo (MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"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.

27 of 30 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 "Author, Advertising Headline... (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 12 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 (Rockville, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do (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.