Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

If you want the proof that we have been living in Brave New World, just get a closer look at the activity of such people as Clotaire Rapaille. Who is Clotaire Rapaille? A psychiatrist and an anthropologist, who’s running a counselling company working for the major global corporations and even for the governments.

You may wonder what the eccentric scientist, the man who resembles the French aristocrat, has to offer to the richest and most powerful?

Clotaire Rappailles’s profession is breaking the codes. The culture codes, of course.

The thing is that Clotaire Rapaille is able to break the culture code of any single thing you intend to sell. On the condition that you are a major corporation or a government and you are able to pay him a large sum of money. And that you want to sell this thing in big quantities. Real big.

Isn’t it strange? Just read on how it started.

A several years ago, a big international company called Nestle came with a problem to an eminent child psychologist, a specialist in autistic disorders. The Nestle’s problem was shamefully low sales of coffee in Japan. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Actually, Japan is the country of tea. It’s a traditional drink of Japanese people and coffee simply wouldn’t sell.

Fortunately, Rapaille had good news for people from Nestle. There was a scientific explanation of this situation. From his study and research he knew that while children learn a given word and the idea connected with it, they associate it with certain emotions. He called that primal emotional association an imprint. An imprint is very important because it determines our subsequent attitude to a given thing. He also noticed that imprints differ depending on the country of origin.

The conclusion coming from those discoveries was clear: the Japanese didn’t have the imprint connected with coffee. It was necessary to imprint one onto them.

Nestle had no choice but to accept the fact that it wouldn’t be able to sell coffee to adult Japanese. However, there were children left.

Soon, they started to be sold coffee flavoured candies. Then, there were desserts. And when they grew up, they were offered coffee drinks with a lot of milk. This is how a new generation of consumers was formed.

And this is how Rapaille’s amazing career started.

Today he’s had many achievements of this kind. For example, he explained to French cheese producers why they weren’t able to sell their product to American consumers (the French regard cheese as something living and growing, while Americans see it as a dead thing; they put it in a plastic bags and keep it in the fridge). He also helped the French government in creating a positive image of atomic energy. That’s why in France the anti – nuclear movement is a lot weaker than in Germany, for instance.

Rapaille’s catchword is Reptilian always win.’ By reptilian he means the most primitive and primal part of our brain, which, according to him, is responsible for the majority of our preferences as consumers. In other words, our decisions what to buy are made based largely on unconscious instinct, which is to certain extent determined by the culture we grow up in. No matter how weird and surprising it may sound, this mixture of anthropology and Jungian psychoanalysis really works, which is confirmed by the fact that almost half of Forbes’s Top 100 Corporations are his clients.

While conducting the marketing research, Rapaille uses an unusual approach. First, he gathers the potential buyers and lets them talk, although he thinks that they have really nothing important to say. He claims that in reality people don’t know why they do what they do and why they buy the things they buy. Nevertheless, this stage of procedure has a precise purpose. It is to make people feel how clever they are and how much they have to say. When they feel that way, they become relaxed enough to go through the next stage. After a short break they are asked to describe a given thing or a phenomenon in such a way as it would be clear for a five-year-old alien from other planet. As a consequence, they have to change their manner of thinking completely. After another break, when they come back, they are surprised at the fact that the chairs are gone and they have to sit on the floor. Now the proper part of the session begins. It consists mainly in telling stories about the first experiences with given products. This the way in which the cultural code of a given product is discovered. Rapaille intentionally uses the word discovered because he claims that the code is something that we know very well but aren’t capable of discerning.

This is not the logic of coercion or deceit that governs here. This is the logic of total manipulation and adjustment. The market doesn’t only fulfil the needs. It knows about our needs more than we do. What chance do we have facing such powerful forces? Even if Rapaille is a kind of modern charlatan resembling the renaissance alchemists who promised to transmute lead into gold, still his career is very meaningful because it shows what kind of thinking prevails among those in power. Real power.