The Culture Code
An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do
1 of 1 copy available
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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 6, 2006 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780767924924
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780767924924
- File size: 2066 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 1, 2006
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. -
May 1, 2006
Why do people behave the way they do? Transplanted French-born psychiatrist and popular marketing consultant Rapaille offers readers a new paradigm for contemplating human activity. From his research on the impact of emotion on learning, Rapaille theorizes that human behavior and decision making are based in large part on cultural archetypes, or -Culture Codes, - the unconscious meanings people ascribe to concepts such as beauty, work, and food, based on the culture in which they were raised. Building on this notion of cultural archetypes, Rapaille analyzes two dozen aspects of American society, defining culture codes for everything from health to shopping to seduction, and contrasting these codes with those of other cultures. This book has been compared with Malcolm Gladwell -s "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" though Rapaille -s prose lacks the style that made "Blink"a pleasure to read. Still, the comparisons between American codes and the codes of other cultures are entertaining, and businesses may well benefit from the implications his conclusions have for marketing their products. Recommended for corporate and public libraries. " -Elizabeth L. Winter, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta"Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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