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

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.

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.

Seeing the number of strong reviews, I bought this book expecting deep insight into how consumers across cultures differ in how they make buying decisions (as indicated by the subtitle). At the very least, I was hoping for a thought-provoking framework for thinking about this stuff.

Instead, I got surface-level assertions primarily targeted at the American psyche and seemingly supported only by casual observation and a few focus groups. Indeed, the lack of real scientific rigor and foundational theory supporting his words make it pretty easy to blow holes in every one of Rapaille's arguments (especially the ideas of the Reptilian Brain and America's Cultural Adolescence) and make the book frustrating to read. Like some other reviewers, I also nearly put it down after 100 pages.

On the other hand, the Codes that he's defined for Americans' views of things like food, quality, health, and money are reasonable enough. So to some foreign audiences and perhaps also to Americans and Marketers without previous exposure to cultural anthropology, I can understand how some of his ideas may seem profound.

If you don't fit into either of those categories, don't bother buying this book.

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