You may have heard his name in association with The Hummer / SUV marketing and/or advertising in general.  He also featured rather prominently in Frontline’s documentary, The Persuaders.   His name is Clotaire Rapaille and he’s thought of as a secret weapon by the marketing departments of the largest corporations in the world.

Clotaire believes that companies have to appeal to the emotions and impulses of the “reptilian” brain instead of consumers’ conscious, stated, and rationalized desires.   And he further believes that, to do this, one has to probe into the deepest emotional “imprintings” made on consumers by their culture.

It is these imprintings – the deeply emotional, largely subconscious, and highly emotional associations – that determine the “code” for a given culture.  So different cultures will have differing codes (or emotional associations) with the same item, product category, life event, etc.  And those codes will be entirely different than how the members of that culture will normally think about the item.  Here’s an example:

Folgers hired Clotaire to uncover the code for coffee in America.  And according to Clotaire, coffee aroma = home.  Here’s Clotaire explaining it during an interview:

For example, aroma is number one. Why? Because we imprint the aroma first, not the taste. Aroma is imprinted at a very early age, when you are around 2. Ah, and it means home, mother, feeding you, love and so on. A large majority, 90-something percent of Americans, love the aroma of coffee. Only 47 percent like the taste.

I don’t know if you remember this commercial, but it was really on code. You have a young guy coming from the Army in a uniform. Mother is upstairs asleep. He goes directly to the kitchen, “Psssst,” open the coffee, and the smell — you know, because we designed the packaging to make sure that you smelled it right away. He prepares coffee; coffee goes up; the smell goes upstairs; the mother is asleep; she wakes up; she smiles. And we know the word she is going to say, because the code for aroma is “home.” So she is going to say, “Oh, he is home.” She rushed down the stairs, hugged the boy. I mean, we tested it. At P&G they test everything 400 times. People were crying. Why? Because we got the logic of emotion right.

Fascinating, right?  Well here’s what he has to say about French Culture:

• The French code for France (it’s hidden self-image) is IDEA.  The French consider themselves thinkers.  In fact, Clotaire says: “…for the French, the code is “to think.” That’s it: to think. “I think, therefore I am” — not “I do,” “I think.” The French believe [that they are] the only thinkers of the world and that they think for the rest of the world.”

• The French Code for Luxury is “the freedom to do nothing and to own useless things – things that provide beauty and harmony, but have no practical function.  A common French expression translates as ‘What is useless is what I cannot live without.’”  Clotaire further explains, “To the French, Luxury is something that offers the highest level of pleasure – the finest food, the most elegant clothing, the most refined fragrance.”  And this differs from Americans who typically seek luxury in things they can use – high-end laptops, expensive handbags, big homes with professional-grade cooking ranges and refrigerators, etc. 

• The French Code for Alcohol has to do with refined pleasure – for adding to the taste, pleasure, and enjoyment of food.  This is why wine is not so much a luxury or a “drug” in French culture, but a necessary part of daily life – because the pursuit of aristocratic and refined pleasure is what life is all about for the French.

I found Clotaire Rapaille’s book, The Culture Code, fascinatingly packed with these kind of cultural insights, and I think the first two that I repeated here really help to explain why Paris is such a mecca for art, dance, fashion, and intellectual life.  All of those things perfectly fit both French cultural identity in terms of ideas, along with the French sense of luxury as non-utilitarian refinement, elegance, and pleasure.

And so in my novel, The Last Train from Pairs, that city becomes a natural draw for both the painter and the ballerina – a place where the ideas and the beauty of art are cherished and supported.

Have you ever had the experience of either growing up in or moving to a city or area whose culture and values perfectly synced with your own?  Of arriving and feeling that “this is the place for me” (or leaving and realizing that you’d been living in your ideal environment all along)?